After the disaster of Iraq, Bush turns his attention to Algeria
By Leonard Doyle, The Independent, 9 February 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/
article2251347.ece
War, it is said, is God’s way of teaching Americans
geography. As Iraq sinks into the mire, President Bush’s
attention is turning to Algeria.
He is, we are told, reading Alistair Horne’s « A Savage War
of Peace, » the definitive account of the French
twentieth-century experience of fighting Muslim
insurgents. It recounts in detail how the French tortured
Algerian combatants and non-combatants alike and how
despite winning the Battle or Algiers they eventually lost
the war.
There are enough alarming comparison between the two
conflicts: compromised officials, porous borders, a hated
occupying force to keep President Bush glued to the
weighty book.
Horne compares the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and
the indefinite detention of detainees in Guantanamo to
French behaviour in Algeria. It ultimately cost France the
war, because the wave of public revulsion was such when it
was publicised that opinion swung violently against the
conflict.
Another cautionary tale about Algeria, is the bloody
chaos, the French left behind when they eventually
extricated themselves in 1962. There followed decades of
civil war and tens of thousands of civilian deaths and
human rights abuses on a massive scale by Islamic
insurgents and the government forces.
As in Algeria, a major power is faced with an Arab
insurgency that has targeted the occupying forces as well
as the police, public servants, innocent civilians. The
Americans are facing the same issues that the occupying
French faced in the Algeria of the 1950s. France had
500,000 troops in Algeria at one point, far more than the
numbers of US troops in Iraq.
As Horne told National Public Radio in the US: « I was
asked to send it to him, and I thought, rather
impudently… it’s 700 pages, I thought I would simplify
things for him by underlining one or two points… and
this was largely around the time of Abu Ghraib. And I
pointed out to him that the whole question of abuse and
torture is no no no… The French won the Battle of
Algiers, you may have seen that famous film, through the
use of torture, but they lost the war through it. »
