Algeria

The stab-in-the-back theory of Vietnam still echoes: the media, the politicians, the hippies, et al. kept the grunts from “winning.” But that post-colonial war was not “winnable” by military force, even if every battle was won. There isn’t going to be a “victory” in Iraq, either. I worry about the effects of this loss on the military. Its so-called professionalization has in many ways cut it off from civil society. Ending the draft and tossing the notion of citizen-soldiers into the dustbin of history positioned the military outside the mainstream, while the self-styled romanticism of “warrior” culture threatens to imbue them with the sense that they’re better than that mainstream because they’re protecting it. A strong identification with the Right hardly helps. It’s not hard to imagine the circumstances that will make them feel like they have to step in. For you know the reasoning will be that they are saving democracy (from itself).

The reason I’m thinking such dark thoughts is that I’m reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. I’ll be coming back to the many disturbingly relevant themes in this must-read, but for the moment I want to touch on the dangers of a defeated military to a democracy. The French Army, humiliated in 1940, rode back to glory in ’45, but only on the coattails of the Allies; then it had its ass kicked in Dien Bien Phu, after another decade of war; the colonels, who had by then spent their entire adult lives fighting, drew the line in Algeria. They damn sure wouldn’t let the politicians betray them again (as they saw it; this was before the “media” was such a whipping boy) and went so far as attempt a coup d’etat. Well before then, they had been deeply compromised by the use of torture.