Knowing history can indeed help us avoid being "condemned to repeat
it"--though as often as not only by making new, more interesting
mistakes. But how can we explain a case of two peoples who seem
compelled both to remember and relive an experience they would much
rather forget?
Barely three decades after fighting one of the bitterest of all
colonial wars, France and Algeria are again embroiled in conflict.
The rhetoric in both countries constantly recalls what some now term
"The First Algerian War", but even while they deplore their plight
they cannot help falling into familiar roles: the Algerians in a
fratricidal civil war, the French supporting a discredited regime to
avoid a still worse alternative. With bombs set by Algerian Islamists
exploding across the country and armed soldiers patrolling the
streets of Paris, France's drift toward a deepening confrontation
will continue along the path of least resistance. As it does so,
America will have to be deaf to appeals to join in a new crusade
against resurgent Islam. There are indeed lessons to be learned from
the first Algerian War that may yet help us to keep out of the
second, but learning them requires confronting something even more
intractable than the vaunted "Green Peril": our own ingrained
attitudes toward Arabs and Islam.
Most Americans first learned of the Algerian conflict when Islamist
rebels hijacked an Air France jetliner last Christmas Eve. Many were
then surprised to learn that at least thirty thousand people had been
killed there since a military regime seized power three years before;
that if the rebels were to win, hundreds of thousands of refugees
were expected to head north for Europe; and that the French
government therefore considered Algeria--not Bosnia or nuclear
testing--to be the gravest problem it faced.
