Monday, December 11, 2006

Two More Points on Horne, and a Third

Still in immured in Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, about the French/Algerian war¸ I offer two not very closely related bits of speculation:

  • Tis said that this is the must-read book among thinking military in Iraq. Why, I wonder? When I first heard about it, I assumed that they wanted to learn about a difficult, dangerous, corrupt war, in the end unsuccessful. If so, bully for them. Conceding that there are great differences between Iraq and Algeria, still there is a great deal to learn from this wise and insightful book—about the mechanics of war, but more generally about war, politics, legitimacy and a great deal more.

But the book is too rich for such easy summary. It is also, among many other thngs, a book about a revolution—the utter disintegration and agonizing rebirth of France. Of perhaps even greater urgency, it is a book about a putsch – an attempt by the military to seize the government of a great nation, remarkable not so much because it failed but because it came so close to success.

We’re such sheltered children: we seem to have no idea of the real menace of a powerful military in a democratic society. Granted we have endured a strong military for most of a century now, and we are overwhelmingly the better for it. That’s partly the result of intention and design, but we cannot underrate the importance of dumb luck. We had better thank our lucky stars that they never put themselves in such a configuration as to make this stuff possible.

Reading Horne on the putsch, the really disturbing point is that the French officer corps was not a gang of thugs. Of course there were thugs enough and to spare—aren’t there always?—but on the whole, this was as skilled, experienced and professional a military organization as you could hope for. And yet they got to the point where they saw themselves as th only effective force for order and good government in a badly mismanaged nation.

We’re not there yet. But make no mistake about it, children, when a nasty war tears you to bits and you begin to look to the military as the source of sanity, you’ve put yourself on a perilous road, indeed. I wonder what Horne’s readers in Iraq think on this issue.

  • And now, a word about torture. Much has been made of the crude cost-benefit example: the bomb is about to go off and your man knows where it is buried, you can save a hundred lives. Fine, I have nothing more to add to that. But if (big if) you want to wander on down the cost-benefit road, Horne suggests two other avenues you had better explore. One, for every terrorist you torture, how many do you create? One? One hundred? I have no idea, and uncertainty itself may be enough to discredit cost-benefit analysis altogether. But anybody who thinks they can do the calculus without adding up this column is simply playing with numbers.

And even if we get past this last set of questions—how to measure the damage to the soldiers who are called upon the inflict the torture? Some torturers are, I suppose, born monsters (whatever that means). Horne makes it clear that many are not: many are ordinary folks who are called upon to do a particular job—and find that their own sense of themselves is forever damaged and demeaned. Anybody want to show me the price ticket for that?

Footnote: I have recounted that Horne’s book is said to be a hit with the American military in Iraq. Last spring it was out of print; as I recall, copies were on offer at Amazon priced in excess of $100 (Horne’s book has since been brought back into print by New York Review of Books; link). Anyway, the other great book to come out of the Algerian War is David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare (1964) (link), also out of print. There are 10 Amazon reviews, all five-star. There is one used copy on offer; the price is $162.85.

Footnote to footnote: The Rand Corporation has recently released a formerly classified report, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-58, (link) which formed the basis for Galula’s book. Interesting to note that the “successful” counterinsurgency ended in 1958, but the war persisted until 1962.

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