The 10th of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks: The insurgency remained invisible except during its attacks. It issued no statements. Unlike other insurgencies, such as in Algeria in the 1950, it had no visible leaders or spokesmen, no diplomatic offices operating in friendly Arab capitals. All that was really known of was its location and attacks. . . .
The U.S. wasn't a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to hold on to a restive province, but it sometimes acted like one. "This is the way an administration caught with its plans down habitually reacts under such circumstances," Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of Peace, the classic history of the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. "Whether it be the British in Palestine, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, the Portugese in Mozambique, or the French in Indo-China. First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."
© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.
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