La Guerre en Irak et de Gaulle
Scott McConnell, Editor of The American Conservative (and my boss), has done the commentary world a favor by writing on the parallels between the American experience in Iraq and the French experience in Algeria. As he notes, far from perfect is illuminating. 
What lessons might Americans draw from the Algerian war? They are not obvious. The brutal conflict, which gave rise to an extraordinary memoir literature in French, impinged on France’s national life far more than Iraq has yet touched America. But some common features are clear. The Algerian war was more or less part of our own historic era, influenced by international air travel and mass communications. A Western democracy was facing off against Arab Muslims; terrorism against civilians—first employed by the Arab guerrillas and later by the French far Right—was a central aspect of the war; and the use of torture to root out the terror networks produced a moral upheaval in France. Indeed, the war very nearly cost France its democracy. - Scott McConnell
Curiously, the only two wars with which our commentariat seems familiar are WWII and Vietnam. In the first case America is employed in the noble cause to rid the world of Nazis and the terror of imperial Japan. That's the good war. Vietnam is the war in which Americans, swept up by anti-communism (a dubious motive, it's often implied), involved themselves in a third-world conflict that they did not understand and then worsened their situation by continuing to fight long after the strategic situation revealed that the U.S. could not win. That's the bad war. Those who say the war is good invoke Churchill and Bastogne. Those who say the war is bad name L.B.J. and Tet. My suspicion, and admittedly I am a cynic, is that these wars figure prominently in our commentary not just because they are the two largest wars within historical memory but because our historical knowledge as a people is so thin that the public and our intellectuals can only talk about the wars that are most often portrayed in our popular entertainment. This also explains how the lessons drawn from these conflicts are so simplistic. Every dictator is an intolerable Hitler. Every setback is a new Tet.
But read literature from the American Civil War. It is filled with references to the battles of Antiquity, to Agincourt in the middle ages, to Thermopylae and scores of other conflicts from the Biblical times into their own era. I would propose that by expanding our knowledge of history, we would expand our strategic and moral imagination. As persons we understand ourselves by encountering others. When we engage a personality from another era in a good historical biography our own era's prejudices and perspective are made visible to us, often for the first time. The same is true for nations and history. America's public and intellectual elites do not know history. How can we say we know our enemies or know ourselves. Sun Tzu would be ashamed, no?
Oh- and just so you don't think I'm on my high horse. I like watching Band of Brothers as much as anyone.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics
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"According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy. According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime -- but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush that history would decide who was right."
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