In Fact...

LESSONS FROM ALGIERS

Adam Shatz writes: Recently the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 The Battle of Algiers for a group of forty officers and civilian experts, on the theory that the film's highly praised quasi-documentary realism would help them understand urban guerrilla warfare in Iraq. But a better analogy to the situation in today's Iraq is Israel's predicament in southern Lebanon in 1982. After winning the gratitude of much of the Shiite population for rooting out the PLO, Israel decided to effect "regime change," creating an army of collaborator-militias and carrying out sweeps. The result was the emergence of Hezbollah, a guerrilla organization that carried out a disciplined and highly effective struggle against the Israeli occupation, ultimately forcing Israel to withdraw. But even if the The Battle of Algiers analogy isn't perfect, it's still worth contemplating. The French officer who leads the battle in Pontecorvo's film is Colonel Mathieu, an urbane, charismatic veteran of the Resistance, loosely modeled on Jacques Massu, the commander of the French forces in Algiers. In his efforts to quell the insurgency, Mathieu introduces a reign of terror, killing, torturing and humiliating Algerians. Journalists raise objections at press conferences, but Mathieu puts them in their place, much as Donald Rumsfeld does today. Mathieu "wins," but, as Pontecorvo reminds us, five years later Algeria achieves independence, thanks to the tenacity of the Algerian people but also to Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who, after years of insisting he would never "abandon" Algeria, finally decided that France had much more to lose by staying than by leaving. He had to summon enormous courage to do so, overcoming the objections of a furious settler lobby and the warnings of timid colleagues who told him, as neocons do today, that he mustn't "cut and run." Rather than study the methods of Mathieu (whose contrite real-life model, Massu, repudiated torture before his death last year), the Pentagon would be better advised to study de Gaulle's example and set a rapid timetable for withdrawal.

ANYONE FOLLOWING THE MONEY?

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