Horne's key argument is that France lost the war because it lost its political will. What Bush seems to have taken away from the book is that that won't happen to him. I posed the counterargument to Horne that the insurgency in Iraq has been largely fueled by the fact that even ordinary Sunnis and Shiites, as well as jihadi extremists, perceive the U.S. as an occupying Western force.
"As long as we're there, we'll be attacked," I said. "But if we leave, they won't have us to unify them, and the non-jihadist insurgents may turn on the jihadists."
Horne nodded. "Yes, they see us as crusaders. Henry Kissinger has a very interesting theory which I go along with. I know the word 'mercenary' has a terribly pejorative sound in American ears -- you think of the Hessians, the 'bloody lobsterbacks.' But Henry's idea is that you bring in neutral people. He mentioned the Indian army. What you need in Iraq is a kind of mercenary force. Say the Indians have a huge army, which they have difficulty in paying. So we buy a division or two. We have the Gurkhas, but unfortunately, there are only a brigade of them. We need more. We need some country that is not a crusader, not tarnished, to take over."
I said that barring the arrival of the Gurkhas, it sounded like he was pretty pessimistic that there could be any outcome in Iraq short of a regional meltdown or an internecine blood bath. "Actually, I've become more optimistic than most people I know," Horne replied. "Optimistic in my pessimism. Taking the long-term historian's view, one of these days they're going to start running out of suicide bombers. Even the Japanese ran out of kamikazes at the end of the last war. Remember the anarchist movement at the end of the 19th century? They murdered an American president [McKinley], two French presidents and a Russian czar. Everyone was terrified of the anarchists who walked around with a bomb with a fuse burning. Then suddenly one day, they disappeared. They just simply disappeared. This is my optimism, that this may happen."
Horne advanced a creative solution to the Middle East mess. "I have a Jewish ex-Baghdadi friend in New York, Ezra Zilkha, who has made a huge fortune in banking. This is what I'd call the Zilkha plan. Take the worst place in the world, the most miserable, inefficient, god-awful, messed-up place: Gaza. Make a mini-economic miracle there. Create something like Dubai. Have a duty-free port. Dubai has nothing that Gaza hasn't got. It's got the sea, and if the Israelis would let them use it, it's got natural gas.
"Now, I'm reminded of one of my heroes, Talleyrand," Horne continued. "He was a real old rascal. But among his many very wise statements, he said, 'Wherever there's trouble, look for a priest.' He was a defrocked priest so he knew what he was talking about. Honestly, if you look at it, in Northern Ireland, trouble was caused largely by priests on one side or the other. And what's happened in Northern Ireland? The solution has nothing to do with religion. We got the priests out of there, thanks to the EU. The best thing it ever did was make Ireland prosperous. And prosperity made up for religion. This is the only hope for the Middle East, to somehow neutralize the mullahs by creating a small economic miracle. To persuade young Muslims that there's a better life than blowing themselves up by running casinos and whorehouses and hotels and what have you."
Horne then turned his historian's eye on Islam. "Don't you think, when you look at Islam -- and I don't want to get my knees shot off or my head taken off -- you see the most terrible incompetence compared to the rest of the world? Take Pakistan compared to India. India is the most enormous mess, but it's a democracy and it works. Pakistan has always been a disaster. Name me one single Islamic country that has been a success. Turkey, but it's secular. Take England. One of the troubles we have with the Muslim population is economic. Within our Asian population, the Indians' earnings are something like 10 times that of the Muslim population. This must say something."
I said that Islam had never had an Enlightenment or a decisive church-state split, when the ideas of all-embracing political Islam were decisively rejected. This stood in the path of modernism.
"Absolutely," Horne replied. "In terms of European history, they're at the time of the Inquisition."
"But I think that the West must also share some of the blame for the tardiness of the Muslim world as well," I said.
"How come?" Horne asked.
"Because of repeated colonialist maneuvers by England, by France, notably England's occupation of Iraq in the earlier part of the 20th century."
"It's not a bright story," Horne agreed.
"There were many attempts, in Egypt, in Iraq and elsewhere, where Arab countries attempted to create constitutional democracies that were squelched," I went on. "I'm not saying they were advanced movements, but they were effectively suppressed by the colonialist powers because they didn't want them to gain independence. This is not a blank-check excuse for the backwardness of the Muslim world, but it plays a role as well."
"Can I throw out, against that argument, two former French colonial properties -- Vietnam and Algeria?" Horne said. "Vietnam is the new Malaysia, it's the new Taiwan. You go to Saigon and you think it's a sort of an American fantasy. By contrast, look at Algeria. What a mess. In Algeria, in the civil war that started in 1990, perhaps 200,000 were killed, and nobody knows quite what they were fighting for. It's like the Thirty Years' War in Europe. Vietnam suffered far, far more during its war, in terms of casualties and destruction, than Algeria did. I think the Muslim world ought to take a serious look at that and ask themselves why.
"Now, on the other hand, on your point, I know Egypt well, I served there in the army," Horne said. "In Egypt we did sit on the Egyptian anti-royal movement because they were nationalists and they really wanted us out. We didn't want out. The same was true with the French in Algeria."
I asked Horne if he had a sense of why the Bush administration was so hellbent on this war, even before 9/11. One of the most-discussed issues in America today, I told him, is why did this war happen? Horne said he could lend his own personal experience toward an answer. "In April 2002, I was lecturing to 24 U.S. generals, four-star generals, the top brass in Europe, in France, and it was absolutely clear to me that they were all set to go to war in Iraq," he said. "They were discreet about it, but they pretty well knew what spots they were going into. There was the commander of the 3rd Division, the commander of the 3rd Corps, and it was all set up. That was a year before the war. Then, six months later, I was lecturing at the marvelous VMI, the Virginia Military Academy, where General Marshall graduated. At dinner there were some very bright colonels -- it's colonels who run armies, not generals -- from the Pentagon. One of them said to me, 'Remember what they said about the First World War, "the trains have left the station"'? That was October, and the trains had left the station. Actually, I think they'd pretty well left the station by the April before."
With a roguish glint in his eyes, Horne suddenly asked, "Would you have Tony Blair sent to the Hague for war crimes?"
The question was obviously designed to prompt me to ask him the same question, so I did.
"Yes, actually, I would, I would," Horne replied. "I wonder to what extent the British tail wasn't wagging the American dog. I worked for British intelligence, so I know a little bit about whether it's good or bad. There is a notion that the British secret service is the best in the world. That belief dies hard. I have a feeling we've sold you an awful lot of crap. I may be wrong, this is a pure hunch."
But what would the British motivation be for ginning up this war?
"It's a mystery to me because I always regarded Blair before this as absolutely the original trimmer -- someone who would trim his sails to whatever the media said he should do," Horne replied. "Then suddenly he goes out on a limb on this one thing. To me it's a mystery. It's a kind of zealotry. He is our neocon. I think it's a certain sort of arrogance. He wanted to be liked, he liked the White House. He liked being there with Clinton, liked being there with Bush, liked feeling like he was important. I question whether America would have gone in if the British had said, 'Invade Iraq? No way.' To my mind it's done immeasurable damage to the special relationship, which I value immensely.
"Just quite simply, I think Blair should be impeached for lying. Either he lied or he was lied to and was therefore incompetent. The Iraqi weapons, the yellowcake. I'm being extremely disloyal to my country, but I think we have a lot to answer for. It's infuriating -- it's always infuriating when the French prove to be right," Horne said, laughing. "I had a great friend, Richard Cobb, a historian at Oxford, who used to say, 'Wonderful country, France. Pity about the French.' I don't go that far. I say 'Wonderful country. Pity about the Parisians.'"
I asked Horne what he thought the genesis of the war in America was. "What about the very delicate subject, I hesitate to raise it in Washington, of the Israeli tail wagging the American dog?" asked Horne. "Have you read Tom Ricks' book ['Fiasco']? He discusses the influence of, I don't know what you would call it, Holocaustology. There are three people he cites in that book -- [former third-ranking Pentagon civilian Doug] Feith, [former Undersecretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and [key neocon strategist Richard] Perle. At some point in Ricks' book, each one cites the Holocaust as being a reason for going into Iraq. 'If we don't go into Iraq, this is going to happen again.'
"Now, it's a very sensitive subject; nobody's more aware of that than me. I've had eight books published in Israel. I know that at least one of them helped Sharon win the '73 war. So I think I can say fairly hard things that other people might shy away from," Horne said. "But it seems to me that to say the Holocaust made the invasion of Iraq essential is rather like the French saying in 1940 we're going to fight this new war with the weapons of 1918. It's simply historically not useful. In practical terms, has it actually pushed a future Holocaust further away or has it brought it closer? I think it's brought it closer. Look at this ghastly war with Hezbollah -- the first war that Israel's lost. Hezbollah had primitive rockets. What's going to happen when there are rockets that can reach every single part of Israel? I think Israel is in a very dangerous position."
I told Horne that when I was reading "A Savage War of Peace," I thought it had some relevance to the Iraq war, but much more relevance to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis are not colonialists in the same way as the French were, I said, but like the French they're facing a classic national liberation struggle.
"I think you're right," Horne said. "You know, I discovered that my book was Sharon's favorite bedside reading," he laughed. (In a piece last year in the British newspaper the Telegraph, Horne wrote about this, saying, "It seemed he was reading it from left to right, and got the message entirely wrong." He added, "On the whole, my sympathies have instinctively been with Israel.")
Horne provided a fascinating historical gloss on how the U.S. botched Iraq. "One of the stupidest things the U.S. did, and this comes out in Ricks' book and Rajiv's [Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"], was disarming the Baathists, the Iraqi army," Horne said. "I mean, honestly. To go back in history, we beat Napoleon in 1814 and sent him to Elba. Then he had this amazing comeback in 100 days and very nearly beat the hell out of us at Waterloo. How did he manage to resurrect his army? Because the stupid fat king didn't pay them! He stood down Napoleon's army. They were all these old soldiers who weren't paid. It was the same thing in Iraq. There were what, a half a million men, and we just said, 'Go home.' You don't think they're going to set up a kebab stand in Baghdad. They're going to use their weapons. We created the insurgency there."
Horne then sprung another one of his now-familiar sly rhetorical questions. "Do you think we were enticed into Iraq by Osama bin Laden?"
I replied that Horne had pointed out in his book that it was Insurgency 101 to use terror to make your adversary respond with such disproportionate force that the population goes over to you. "I think we gave him a gift beyond his wildest dreams," I said.
"Yes, we always assume that our adversaries are stronger than they really are," Horne said. "Except when it comes to Germany. Osama is rubbing his hands in glee. Everything's going his way."
I asked Horne how he would rate the Iraq episode historically? One Israeli historian, Martin van Creveld, said that Iraq was "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them."
Horne laughed. "Chou en-Lai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution and he said, 'It's a bit too early to say.' I think it's too early to say about Iraq. A tactical disaster, yes. Strategic -- maybe. What I worry about, and I don't know if this is a strategic or a policy disaster, is that we're fighting the wrong war in the wrong place."
What would be the right war in the right place? "I think I would have kept out of Iraq altogether and used special operations to track down al-Qaida," Horne said. Then, inadvertently echoing one of Rumsfeld's most infamous lines, he said, "But the trouble with all wars is that you fight them with the weapons you've got, not the weapons you wish you had. Take the British bomber command in WWII. Why did we blast the hell out of German cities? Because it was the only weapon we had. We built these bombers and if we had built attack bombers, light bombers, maybe we would have been much more effective. But this was the weapon we had. In Iraq, the weapon you have is the most efficient air force, the most efficient army. It was brilliantly done from a military point of view. But not a strategic one."
I told Horne that I noticed that he, like almost all historians, wrote about terrorism in a completely nonjudgmental way, as a military tactic, whereas journalists, under pressure to express moral outrage on behalf of their countrymen, have difficulty doing so.
Horne nodded. "Yes, that's very true. If terrorism is effective, you become a freedom fighter. As Talleyrand said, 'Treason is a matter of dates.'"
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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