William F. Buckley, Algeria, and Iraq

Quoted from The New Republic, March 19, 2007 - "Athwart History," by Sam Tanenhaus

But Buckley recognizes that cold war analogies of any kind are dubious. For one thing, in the age of terrorism, the "enemy" is not so easily classified or even identified. "Individual terrorists were, only yesterday, engaged in ordinary occupations, shocking friends and family when they struck as terrorists," Buckley wrote in August 2005. By this time, he had already uncovered another, more useful parallel. In October 2004, a week before Election Day, he presciently exhumed in his column a half-forgotten 1978 book, A Savage War of Peace, the classic account of the Algerian war written by Alistair Horne, the British Historian who is one of Buckley's oldest friends (the two were boarding school roommates in the early '40s). What made the book "hideously relevant to our present problems in Iraq," Buckley explained, was its description of how the French, trapped in a bloody debacle that dragged on for eight years, were losing to "a factionalist-nationalist movement using terrorism as a means of expressing contempt and hatred for modern forms." At last, in 1962, President Charles de Gaulle "surveyed that mess" and "unconditionally surrendered" rather than risk the only, and unthinkable alternative - a massive military attack. The United States now faced the identical problem and was similarly hamstrung, because, as Buckley warned both Bush and Kerry, "the insurrectionists can't be defeated by any means we would consent to use." Six months later, Bush's inner circle, and Bush himself, would claim to be studying Horne's book - though, earlier this year, Horne told Maureen Dowd that, when he had given a copy of his book to Rumsfeld with passages on torture underlined, he had received a "savage letter" in return.
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Well that's a pretty long passage. I wanted to quote the entire paragraph, though. Now here's a thought about Iraq, building from the comment above that a military victory in Iraq would require us to use methods that no Western country would consent to use. To win militarily in Iraq, we would have to do to one major city after another what we did to Fallujah. We would have to level it, then shoot any person left who misbehaves. Think of what that means: we would have to make Baghdad look as Berlin did in 1945, then keep killing people there until the city was pacified. You don't hear that much about violence in Fallujah these days, do you? It's not a center of insurgent activity the way it was before we leveled it. Well listen, we went through the decision process about attacking Fallujah twice. The first time we couldn't bring ourselves to do it. The second time we went ahead and leveled the city, and we knew afterwards we weren't going to do that again. Yet the results in Fallujah show - and our failure to secure other cities also shows - that military means by themselves won't work for us. They'll only work for us if we're willing to do to the entire country what we did to Fallujah, and we've already decided we're not going to do that. So we are stuck, and we will have to concede defeat, as de Gaulle did.

Here's an afterthought on military means versus political means in the fight we want to finish in Iraq. The Washington watchword throughout the first months of 2007 was that we have to resolve our problems in Iraq with political means, not military means. That's another way of saying what I argued above. It neglects a big qualification, though. The way out of the war in Iraq requires both military and political means, and our leadership has shown so little ability to coordinate our efforts in those two areas. That is a major part of their incompetence: they don't know how to make military power work to enhance other kinds of influence. They don't know how to make other kinds of influence work to enhance military power. They don't know how to coordinate military, economic, political, social, and diplomatic means to serve our nation's interests. They don't have these skills, and they show no evidence of acquiring them as they go along. They are, in short, incompetent.