Given that "A Savage War of Peace" is being read as a mirror of the current war, what does Horne think are the parallels between Algeria and Iraq? "The first one is the difficulty of combating insurgents with a regular army," he said. "Too heavy forces, too much collateral damage. The second is porous frontiers. In Algeria, they had Morocco and Tunisia on either side, so the FLN could stage raids and then go back across the border so the French couldn't get them. Now you've got a similar situation in Iraq, with Syria and Iran. The third is the tactic of targeting local police. In Algeria, the insurgents were just a handful compared to what you've got in Iraq. They realized that they couldn't beat the French army, so they attacked the local police who were loyal to the French. This was enormously successful. The French had to take the army back from search and destroy missions to protect the police. So both the police and the army were neutralized. The insurgents in Iraq have copied the Algerian experience to great effect."
Horne turned to the parallel that he feels most passionately about. "The fourth thing, and this is the painful issue, is torture or abuse," he said. "In Algeria, the French used torture -- as opposed to abuse -- very effectively as an instrument of war. They had some success with it; they did undoubtedly get some intelligence from the use of torture. But they also got a lot of wrong intelligence, which inevitably happens. But worse than that, from the French point of view, was that when the news came out in France of what the army was doing, it caused such a revulsion that it led directly to the French capitulation. And not only revulsion in France, but revulsion here. JFK, as a senator, took up the Algerian cause quite strongly partly because of the human rights issue.
"I feel myself absolutely clear in my own mind that you do not, whatever the excuse, use torture, let alone abuse," Horne went on. "In one way, of course, abuse is not as bad as torture, but in another way it's worse because it's senseless. It doesn't achieve anything. Abu Ghraib was just appalling. In the Algerian war, the media was very primitive -- it took about a year to actually get the news into the press in France. There was no television then. With Abu Ghraib, the images were on Al-Jazeera the next day. The impact, across the whole of the Muslim world, is enormous. What do you get for it? Nothing."
Horne noted that one of the less-known effects of torture is its effect on those who carry it out. "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."
Horne went on to tell of a chilling encounter he had with Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who was responsible for thousands of extrajudicial executions and "disappearances," and widespread torture. According to Human Rights Watch, "torture of political detainees in clandestine detention centers was systematic throughout the Pinochet regime, often overseen by doctors expert in keeping victims barely alive." More than 30,000 Chileans were tortured, according to an authoritative Chilean report. "I had the very good fortune once to interview General Pinochet in 1987, when he was still in power. 'A Savage War of Peace' had been translated into Spanish. I think I was the first gringo journalist to talk to him, largely because he'd read that book. He started off the interview by saying how much he'd liked it. I thought, this is not something to be missed. So I said, 'Well, of course I don't have to tell you that the French army won the battle of Algiers through the use of torture, but it cost them the war.' Pinochet looked me absolutely straight in the eye and said, 'Well, yes, but in Chile we never tortured.'"
In a subsequent phone interview, Horne related an oddly similar encounter -- although he didn't characterize it that way -- he had with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld two years ago. "I was invited to the Pentagon to have lunch with Donald Rumsfeld and it was suggested that I might take a copy of 'A Savage War,'" Horne said. "This was in May 2005, the year after Abu Ghraib. The lunch was called off, so I left the book. I thought, he's an incredibly busy man, I ought to just highlight various passages that I think are of relevance to Iraq. They were mostly to do with torture.
"What I didn't know was that at that particular moment they were having a real soul-searching over Abu Ghraib at the Pentagon," Horne went on. "Rumsfeld wrote back rather tersely, 'As you well know, we do not believe in torture.' 'As you well know' was his way of saying, 'You're a bloody fool. Shut up.' I wrote back to him rather apologetically, saying I hoped he didn't think I was being presumptuous and that what I was really trying to say was that the Americans and British were both singing from the same song sheet [on torture]. I got back a very charming letter saying we were indeed both singing from the same song sheet."
The fifth parallel Horne saw between Algeria and Iraq is the one that now confronts the Bush administration: an exit strategy. "In Algeria, the war went on for eight years, and the military, rather like the military in Vietnam, had a very good case for saying they were winning it," Horne said. "But de Gaulle decided they had to go. They were negotiating for months with the FLN, like the peeling of an onion. The French lost every bloody thing, including the rights to oil. They had to pull out all 1 million pieds noirs." The pieds noirs, of whom Albert Camus is the most famous, were French colonial settlers, many of whom traced their roots in Algeria back to the French conquest in 1830. "One of the worst things that happened in Algeria was what happened to the Harkis, the Algerians who were loyal to France," Horne explained. As he relates in his book, the Harkis were slaughtered by their vengeful countrymen after the French left, with an estimated 30,000 to 150,000 perishing. "Absolutely appalling. I fear that we're going to have a Harki situation or much worse coming up in Iraq, because of the numbers involved. The savagery in Iraq is worse than what it was in Algeria."
Horne believes that America's exit strategy must take into account an updated domino theory. "When the domino theory was applied to Vietnam, it was much despised. People said it didn't mean a thing. But here I think it does, because an over-speedy exit from Iraq is going to leave a vacuum with possibly terrible consequences," he said. "Take Saudi Arabia. Are we going to have another Iranian revolution there? I would think it's really ripe for it. Even aside from al-Qaida, there's an awful lot of opposition to the Saudi royal family. And then you've got the question of Iran, which could emerge as the most powerful power in the area. So I'm just extremely glad I'm not George W. Bush because I don't know how you can get out gracefully."
Horne said that the Democrats' policy on Iraq, which calls for phased withdrawals, runs the risk of opening the doors to chaos and assisting the insurgents. "If Barack Obama is going to run on a ticket of saying we are going to pull everything out by such and such a date, that seems to me to be -- I don't want to sound as though I'm an ardent hawk, because I'm not -- a real ticket of encouragement to the insurgents."
The hasty-withdrawal-leads-to-chaos argument, of course, is one shared by Bush. Bush himself cited "A Savage War of Peace" in support of this thesis at a lunchtime seminar with conservative authors and journalists in March of this year. According to the Weekly Standard's Irwin Stelzer, right-wing historian Andrew Roberts presented a history lesson that echoed the beliefs of George W. Bush. Roberts' teachings, which were avidly received by the president, were to not set a timeline for withdrawal, to stand fast in the face of domestic defeatism, to be unafraid to intern enemies for indefinite periods of time, to cling to the alliance of English-speaking peoples, and to remember we are fighting an enemy that cannot be appeased.
Stelzer writes that in the course of Roberts' discussion of withdrawal, Bush asked for "examples of occupying forces remaining for long periods of time, other than in Korea. Malaysia, said Roberts, where it took nine years to defeat the Communists, after which the occupying troops remained for several years. And Algeria, added Bush, citing Alistair Horne's 'A Savage War of Peace' for the proposition that more Algerians were killed after the French withdrawal than during the French occupation."
Actually, Bush was wrong about the casualties. What Horne wrote is that between 30,000 and 150,000 Harkis were killed after the war, and that the entire conflict cost the lives of considerably more than 300,000 Muslims -- possibly as many as a million, which is the official Algerian figure. But beyond that, it's hard to see what in "A Savage War" would serve Bush as a historical justification for remaining in Iraq. It's easy to imagine Bush regarding France's disgraceful abandonment of the Harkis as a cautionary tale that applies to America. But the two situations are completely different. Iraqis are already being slaughtered in horrendous numbers, thanks to our invasion, and it is unclear whether an American withdrawal will make that better or worse.
The real moral lesson Bush should draw from the betrayal of the Harkis is obvious: We need to immediately provide assistance and U.S. citizenship to the thousands of Iraqis who sided with the U.S., and who now face death in their native land. As George Packer pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece, no such help has been offered. And it is painfully clear that it is not going to be.
Next page: Did the Holocaust make the invasion of Iraq essential?