Iraq and Algiers, and Other Stuff

Underbelly's crack military correspondent has been reading Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace (link):

...and the ending is looking like the end of the war in Iraq: De Gaulle pulled the rug out from under the army – although you can argue that getting the army out without the native’s cooperation would have been very costly.

Everyone seems to agree that the Army had pretty well knocked off active warfare by the FLN in the countryside – but mostly because it had been able to kill off or capture nearly all of the active troops. But what was left was still there – just not fighting. That was possible because the French pretty well sealed the borders with Morocco and Tunisia – not absolutely but sufficiently that the insurgents in country were pretty well isolated. He doesn’t say so but it sounds like the FLN made the decision to go forward with negotiations rather than fighting.

If the book is the basis for Petraeus’ strategy of ‘surge’, there are myriad differences that suggest that we will fail.

Most obvious is that the French had largely isolated the FLN in country from reinforcement and resupply. We cannot seal the Iraqi borders and the insurgents of all varieties have an infinite sources of resupply and reinforcement. It’s hard to see what role ‘world opinion’ plays in this situation (by the end, just about no one was supporting France) but it would appear to range from ambivalent to hostile. Certainly, public opinion here is heavily in favor of ending the war. In that respect, there is some similarity – since it appears that the French were pretty well worn out with the war – and it was fighting the war with conscripts.

The odd part about the book is the passing references to the number of assassination attempts that De Gaulle escaped. I think there were at least 12 that were mentioned only in passing. There were some fairly serious attempts – that failed. (the French Army apparently couldn’t even get an assassination correct). Recall the uproar over the two attempts to off Ford back in the mid ‘70s. If there were 12 known attempts to get Bush in this country, he’d be locked up so tight that the country couldn’t squeak. Yet the book only makes passing reference as though that were fairly close to normal. Even the number of bombings carried out by various groups in metropolitan France would put this country into a tizzy.