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Lesson of Algeria Is Lost On Bush
When a high-ranking French leader suggested in a private meeting that President George W. Bush consider Algeria as a model for a staged disengagement from Iraq, the president reportedly listened, no doubt with that dazed attention span of a windshield wiper. Bush was said to have assured his European petitioner that he just happened to be finishing a book on the Algerian War.
When told of this exchange, I raised a chuckle from my French source by declaring that Bush surely was not reading Camus on Algeria. (Rumors have circulated that Bush recently read Camus' "The Stranger.") The book that the president read on the Algerian War, it turns out, was "A Savage War of Peace," by Alistair Horne. As unlikely as it seems, Beltway reporters circulate as gospel truth that Bush read his way through this 600-page classic examining France's colonialist war against nationalist rebels in Algeria from 1954 to 1962.
The Algerian War took the lives of at least a million Muslims, uprooted French settler-colonists, known as pieds-noirs, and, according to Horne, collapsed the Fourth Republic and wrecked six French governments. Finally, President Charles de Gaulle took the bold stance of ordering a French withdrawal from Algeria.
The lesson Bush apparently draws from Horne's exhaustive study, according to Irwin Stelzer of the Weekly Standard, is that despite the price in blood and treasure, France didn't stay the course long enough in Algeria. This is not exactly what the high-ranking French official had in mind when offering up Algeria as a model for America's disengagement from Iraq.
Perhaps it is Vice President Dick Cheney, the likely war decider, who should be made to consider Algeria. During his Middle East visit last week, with a drive-by in Iraq, he seemed more to be contemplating the fantasy of "Brigadoon."
Near Tikrit, Cheney told U.S. troops that he sympathizes with their hardship-extended tours, which in some cases are indefinite, if not terminal. They were, he said, "vital to the mission" in Iraq. Speaking in the mess hall of desert Camp Speicher, the Road Warrior spoke about duty to a few thousand brave men and women of honor who partake in their country's benefits and now its dire obligations, serving and sacrificing because they were called upon.
Cheney never honored such a call to duty. Five times, as a fit and able young man eligible for the military draft, he hid first behind his college studies, then his obligations as a new father. Perhaps I should admit here that as a father of two months, I was headed for Saigon, but this is not my brief against Cheney. Of the 16 million Americans who sought military deferments, few were granted five, and none went on to brazenly help the commander-in-chief lead the United States into an utterly senseless war - as if Cheney were the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.
On the eve of the invasion in March '03, this genius, whose study at the Yale lamp was too critical to be interrupted by service, declared on "Meet the Press" that the people of Iraq "will welcome us as liberators." After two years of getting attacked as demon invaders, Cheney saw light at the end of the tunnel he'd not foreseen. "The level of [military] activity that we see today," he told CNN in May, '05, "will clearly decline. I think that we are in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
Two years after the "last throes," here was Cheney last week forced to get real in Tikrit with the troops bearing up under the burden: "Conditions around here have gotten a lot worse."
Still, with the American public dead set against the war, and Congress coming around, the Road Warrior of Brigadoon twisted the arm of the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Cheney wants al-Maliki to make nice with the Sunnis and to correct the Bush administration's mistakes of its de-Baathification program by allowing Saddam Hussein's civil servants to return to their posts.
Oh, yes, and Cheney wants an Iraqi law ensuring fair distribution of revenues to all parties, including the United States. That would be revenues from oil.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
13 Comments so far
Show AllI read "A Savage War of Peace" many years ago. When I heard GWB was reading it, I assumed that he would be doing so rather as WC Fields read the Bible - "looking for loopholes". GWB would not be minded to imitate de Gaulle, but looking for cunning plans with which to outsmart him. Looks like I wasn't wrong. Sadly, GWB isn't alone in his failure to learn from french experience in Algeria. Pontecorvo's classic film, "The Battle of Algiers", has been shown as a kind of training video to American officers. Unfortunatley, they have largely learned as little from that as GBW learned from his reading of ASWOP.
I thought you are supposed to do the reading BEFORE you become president not after....or before you launch deadly, destructive wars not after....
It must be a total embarrassment to all American people that this unelected president is doing his History Lessons on the job at the taxpayers expense......
Its just simply unbelievable that this nonsense is then made public for all the world to observe in disbelief......
Bu$h can read?
Let's not forget one additional irony:
Bush's undergrad major at Yale? History.
What's up with Cheney? Last time he went to Saudi Arabia, the very next day OPEC shorted oil production. He shows up this week and rattled the carrier groups in the gulf with his special brand of BS on keeping the water ways open, then returns again to Saudi land to spew additional hatred for Iran and then off to Egypt to bend Mubarak's ear about pressuring Maliki to include more baath/sunni/suicide-bomber crazies in the Iraqi government. He assures this move will stem chaos in Iraq and somehow lessen Iran's impact on the security in the gulf? Isn't the US the only security threat in the gulf? Until we rolled in, was Iran doing something to curtail oil shipments in the gulf? Does Iraq really need more benchmarks they can't meet? Does anyone else but Cheney believe that a government that is basically hiding in the green zone of Baghdad actually capable of unifying the entire country? If the US left tomorrow, in two weeks the insurgency would be over, Maliki and Co would vanish, and finally a real strong arm would emerge to control this mess Cheney started. Isn't that what Cheney really fears?
I am not having a hard time believing Bush read a 600 page book, I am having a hard time visualizing Bush reading anything.
Umm? The sharing of oil revenues?
"Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, US Study Says" by James Glanz http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/12/1152/
If this report is true then the insurgents in Cheney and Bush's oil for war in Iraq are being funded by Iraqi oil stolen by smugglers working for Iraq's oil industry (Ministry)? It makes sense since the insurgency is getting stronger. I am starting to see why the term "Stupid American" is becoming more popular. I wonder if the French had these sort of problems in Algeria.
As for Cheney and his record of avoiding service? What can I say that his first name doesn't already say.
I believe that the whole world knows that Both Cheney and Bush are delusional and irrelevant. They screwed up from day i especially with the name of the Iraq illegal invasion andd occupation. Original name: Operation Iraqi Liberation. Quickly Rove or someone, maybe Fleischer, realized that this spelled OIL and changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Neither Cheney nor Bush actually comprehended any history that they may have read, if they can read.
Sharkie May 13th, 2007 4:36 pm
Very prescient to the immediate future while "Gun Shot Missing" Cheney continues to pull Bush's errr you know what?
......errr strings???
It was better with Colon Power in there too! If you all can't see the smoking gun on reading material...I don't know what to tell ya. To read is one thing, but to understand... Some of the biggest shortcomings to this mess is the misunderstanding that this kid and his cronies are just playing stupid kid games! Drugs and alcohol stunt your mental growth, as you can see by 'their' actions. This dry drunk, coke snorting league is the shame of our country! They don't work with anyone, they just try to bully. So third grade! Party on dudes, Grow Up!
I wish the religious right would see who they supported in the true light. Who wants to see all the tax dollars go to waste playing fast talking rich con man games at the poker table of our kids lives, resources and our own natural existence! So, we could be over this, with all the wasted tax dollars, having wind and solar energy, (ten years ago most likely), if we had a government that worked hard like they wanted to earn their salaries, not rape them from honest taxpayers?!
So history will repeat itself and Bushco is in it with Brittan? Didn't the Bush family want to be back in royalty after they were kicked out of Brittan for trading with the enemy, and then again, caught in WWII? I might be wrong on that, I'm no historian. But, one way or the other, sounds to me like we need "Independence" again!
If this bunch had one ounce of ethic's they would resign! How they manage to face the troops who are dying and lie through their teeth daily speaks to the kind of vermin they really are! It is sickening these criminal's are still in office!
Bush's reading consists of going in one eye and leaving the the other, NO comprehension in the middle!
Let me just get my head around this. Irwin Stelzer believes that De Gaulle wasn't pro-France enough to stick it out in Algeria? I was unaware that the Weekly Standard published science fiction.