Isegoria

In French Lessons, Alvaro Vargas Llosa looks at the lessons of the Battle of Algiers:

What lesson from that conflict is relevant today? The paramount lesson seems this: “First-world” armies and “third-world” guerrillas have different notions of time and space, and therefore of what constitutes defeat and victory. A “first-world” army can defeat “first-world” guerrillas and a “third-world” army can defeat “third-world” guerrillas because in both cases the army and the enemy operate under similar notions of time and space. The Italian security forces were able to defeat the Red Brigades, just as Germany’s security forces were able to defeat the Baader-Meinhof Gang, because they were at war with each other under similar time and space horizons. Equally, Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship was able to defeat the Shining Path in Peru in the 1990s and Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt destroyed the Castro-inspired guerrillas in the 1960s because the warring sides shared a common idea of where and when they were fighting. That is not to say that in all such cases the army will triumph. Castro’s victory in 1959 proves that the opposite can happen. But as long as the established power commands enough civilian support, which is usually the case against a terrorist insurgence, the security apparatus enjoys a big advantage.

In Algeria, the occupying force’s notion of space was purely physical and military: The French paratroopers thought that as long as they smoked the terrorists out of the Casbah — the Muslim quarter in Algiers — they would win. The insurgents’ notion of space was historic and civilian: As long as they gave the oppressed masses a sense of the anomaly that the century-old French presence in their land constituted, the liberation struggle would go on. The French army’s notion of time was narrow, while the insurgents had a broad time horizon. The French won the battle of Algiers but in 1962 they had to give up the colony.

It was not a matter of how many troops there were on the ground. In 1960, France had 400,000 troops in Algeria — not far from the number the U.S. poured into Vietnam. And the moral legitimacy of the insurgents is not defined by the methods they employ, but by how close they are to the population and how effectively they help shape the people’s perception of the enemy. Algeria’s insurgents were tyrants, and once they liberated their nation they established a dictatorship. But the fact that they were perceived as legitimate by the civilian population — precisely because their notion of space and time attached them to that population and the country’s history — meant that the occupiers ended up losing the war whose every battle they had won.

In the second part of Don’t you know your left from your right?, Nick Cohen explores “the disgrace of the anti-war movement” that had a million people marching through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffing up Zarqawi’s role in the violence — as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy — but they couldn’t deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations’s bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.

The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden have finally come out — or at least some of them have:

For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain’s clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government’s files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.

As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners “in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps”.

Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.

The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away.

Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.

At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.

The title, To the Shores of Tripoli, gives away the punchline, but I enjoyed this article, which cites Sam Ser at the Jerusalem Post, who “retells the story from the vantage of Michael Orren’s book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present“:

The meeting in London was doomed from the outset. The Arab strongman’s envoy held all the cards — three craft had already been hijacked, their passengers and crew held hostage in an inhospitable and almost unreachable land. The American ambassador knew the ransom demand would be high, but even he could not have imagined just how exorbitant it would be. To meet it would require one-tenth of America’s annual budget.

Lest the adventurous Yanks dare to contemplate a military attack to rescue their captured comrades, Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar provided a most unpleasant revelation: the Koran declares that any nation that does not bow to the authority of the Muslims is sinful, and it is the right and duty of Muslims to make war upon it and take prisoner any of its people they may find. Further, any Muslim slain in battle against such an enemy would be promised a place in Paradise.

“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever,” the furious but helpless ambassador relayed to his government. Congress would authorize no such fight, however, and voted instead to pay the ransom.

Wretchard adds some important commentary:

It’s now forgotten that capitulation didn’t work. Simply didn’t work. The Barbary Pirates raised their demands until the Pashas were taking nearly 20 per cent of Federal Revenue. But in the beginning the policy of appeasement seemed perfectly. The initial extortion demand of $70,000 was far smaller than the astronomical $2 million dollars requested by Thomas Jefferson to build a Navy. In the end it proved cheaper to crush them.

Here’s a bit of historical trivia that caught my eye:

Before he revised it in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Bangled Banner” — which would become the American national anthem — described “turbaned heads bowed” to the “brow of the brave.”

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq is a normally innocuous bacterium — Acinetobacter baumannii — that has become resistant to most antibiotics, killed immune-compromised troops after surgery, and spread to the wider healthcare community:

The wounded soldiers were not smuggling bacteria from the desert into military hospitals after all. Instead, they were picking it up there. The evacuation chain itself had become the primary source of infection. By creating the most heroic and efficient means of saving lives in the history of warfare, the Pentagon had accidentally invented a machine for accelerating bacterial evolution and was airlifting the pathogens halfway around the world.

To stem the outbreak at its source, the epicon team proposed sweeping reforms throughout the combat zone. The CSHs had to be run more like real hospitals, with frequent scrub-downs, stringent hand-washing, and HEPA filters to clean the air. The dead tissue surrounding “frag” wounds turned out to be an ideal colonization site for the bugs, so it had to be removed more aggressively up front. “If you don’t have that necrotic tissue, your own innate defenses help keep the wound clean,” says Kim Moran, a tropical-disease specialist who assisted the investigation when she worked at Walter Reed. Wound dressings needed to be changed less often, so bacteria from the hospital environment had less opportunity to get in. And the broad-spectrum antibiotics had to be reserved for the treatment of identified bugs.