Geoffrey Wheatcroft, one of the Guardian's veteran correspondents, has posted a "Comment is Free" article in Friday's paper. Though the piece is ever so topical (and unarguably true) -- "The calamity of Iraq has not even won us cheap oil" -- something a bit more historical caught my eye, a recounting of a meeting between two recently retired leaders, war opponent Jacques Chirac and coalition-of-the-willing Tony Blair:
While reiterating his opposition to the war that was about to begin, Chirac made a number of specific points. He reminded Blair that he and his friend Bush knew nothing of the reality of war but that he did: 50 years ago, the young Chirac served as a conscript in the awful French war in Algeria, which Iraq resembles in all too many ways. Then he said that the Anglo-Saxons seemed to think that they would be welcomed with open arms, but they shouldn't count on it. In a very percipient point, Chirac added that a Shia majority shouldn't be confused with what we understand as democracy.
He ended by asking whether Blair realised that, by invading Iraq, he might yet precipitate a civil war there. As the British left, Blair turned to his colleagues and said, doubtless with that boyish grin we happily see less of nowadays, "Poor old Jacques, he just doesn't get it." Well, who got it?
It's heartening to read that at least one (former) leader learned something from Algeria. I don't know how many times I've read about Pentagon screenings of the classic film "The Battle of Algiers" or how George Bush has been reading Alistair Horne's magisterial "A Savage War of Peace," the best history in English of Algeria's war of independence (originally published in 1977, recently reissued).
But what lessons are they taking from these classics? For the Pentagon, I fear, there is a limited reading of the counterinsurgency success of the "battle" of Algiers, which did, for a time, eliminate terrorist cells from Algeria's capital. But what of the larger war? Though the French won the tactical battle, they eventually yielded to the Algerians, after a bloody, protracted war in which France risked losing its soul through torture of "terrorists." Former French President Chirac, who knew enough about the dangers of war by western soldiers in a Muslim country to warn Tony Blair, still could never bring himself to apologize for French use of torture in Algeria.
From Gary Kamiya in Salon - "George Bush's Favorite Historian" - we learn that Alistair Horne has another Algerian lesson for present day Americans:
The damage done to the torturees is awful, but an extraordinary thing is the terrible corruption of torture on the torturers. I've followed it up quite a lot in France. There are mental hospitals that have a lot of ex-soldiers from 50 years ago who are still suffering from what they had to do.
This week we've heard from American Foreign Service Officers telling of difficulties in obtaining treatment for Iraq-induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Soldiers suffer from PTSD in droves. But what will they call the lifelong haunting of CIA (or contractor, or whoever does the deed) operatives who apply, as the French called it in Algeria, The Question? Whatever you or I, or the Attorney-General nominee, or the American President call waterboarding ("enhanced interrogation?"), the individuals who strap the human being to the trolley, or turn on the icy airconditioning, or chain legs and arms in "stress positions" -- they know better than anyone that it is torture. And they will remember it, just like those French soldiers, for the rest of their lives.