The odd couple

JEAN-PHILIPPE IMMARIGEON

The French like to quote a sentence taken from de Gaulle’s Mémoires

de Guerre: ‘I approached the complicated Middle East with straight-
forward ideas.’ Nine centuries after the capture of Jerusalem by Frank-
ish knights, their successors have learned one thing: cohabitation with
the Muslim world, which geography and particularly civilizations based
on common roots makes inevitable, will never be easy. The United
States’s mistake is to deny this fact. This American reductionism ex-
plains not only its own past and present failures but also those towards
which France is heading in its thoughtless and untimely choice of part-
ner. We are heading for a major Franco-American falling-out.

The Afghan quagmire

Over seven years ago, when the Afghan War had just begun, we
penned an article entitled ‘La Guerre Introuvable’1 (The obscure war).
Failure was already visible in the over-the-top and self-sustaining media
hype. By deploying all its technological resources, it was clear that the
United States sought, in addition to taking revenge for the 2001 at-
tacks, to validate its American Way of War and in the process to save
NATO; not only that, but also to wipe out previous humiliations.
Richard Nixon wrote a long self-justifying piece 25 years ago entitled
‘No More Vietnams’. It can be summed up in its last couple of sen-
tences: ‘This could mean that we will never try again. It must mean
that we will never fail again.’
But it takes more than one to make war, and the reviews and White
Papers are based more on military introspection than strategic thought.
1
Jean-Philippe Immarigeon, ‘La Guerre Introuvable’, Défense Nationale, April 2002.

Défense nationale et sécurité collective, November 2009

Jean-Philippe Immarigeon

It is not the Taliban that is beating us but our vanity in declaring that
we have entered a new world with new paradigms (a fine word much
used and abused by George W. Bush), and that logical procedures are
now obsolete. However, a military occupation is still an occupation,
unacceptable by its very nature. The French understand this for his-
torical reasons; the Americans refuse to countenance it. Their ability to
repeat others’ mistakes is exceeded only by their capacity to repeat their
own, from Saigon to Kabul. What do they know of Afghanistan? Their
forebears in Vietnam had an advantage: they spent their pay in the go-
go bars of the country, learned a few words of French, ate and loved in
Vietnamese style. The soldiers of 2009 call on ethnologists or even
anthropologists to try to understand what the Afghan population is
thinking. This betrays an inherent racism, while in fact the Taliban
think no differently of the presence of foreign soldiers on their door-
step than did the American colonists facing British Redcoats. There is
no special cultural feature in this, still less a religious one.
So here we are deadlocked after eight years of war without knowing
where we are going and without any idea of how or why we are there.
This has been an ill-considered engagement in an obscure war since the
autumn of 2001. While it is comforting to think that our security is at
stake in the Afghan/Pakistani tribal areas, where our civilization has few
admirers and even fewer representatives, this must be demonstrated in
other ways than merely repeating clichés about the shrinking world and
the global village. But this is the only view expressed and it leads us
into a trap: we remain there in the expectation that things will improve
sufficiently to allow us to depart and in fact they only get worse. As the
French Chief of Defence Staff (CEMA) stated at the end of the winter
of 2008: ‘As I have said for some time, Afghanistan is becoming an
unmanageable shambles and we have no reason to get more involved.’
This view has never been contradicted either by its author or by events
on the ground. In the United States the situation is described by har-
assed officials, in a slightly more colloquial way, as ‘a mess’.

Memories of Vietnam

America has once more taken refuge behind what it knows best how to
do. As Charles Baudelaire wrote: ‘America gossips and rambles on with
extraordinary volubility.’ But behind the incoherent and rambling de-

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bate of a claimed new strategy there is not the least sign of a rethink.
Those who expected a restoration of American power are already dis-
appointed. It is not clear whether Barack Obama is seeking a military
or a political solution. Does he know himself? To discover at this stage
that he must treat with so-called Taliban moderates would not make
sense; the United States entered this war to demonstrate its power, not
to display the skills of its negotiators. The increase in troop numbers in
Afghanistan illustrates this inability to think of power in any other
terms than brute force, and certainly the impossibility of thinking
about the future. The ghost of Westmoreland2 still haunts the Oval
Office.
It is pointless to pass the hat round European allies who are all the
more sparing with their troops as they become more alarmed at the
ineptness of the American enterprise. Although NATO is bogged down
in a military-technological muddle, it cannot change course, think of
new ways of employing its forces or carry out a top-to-bottom review
of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Transformation. It can only
tinker, plug gaps, use sticking plaster and waste time. It may not suffer
a military defeat in the full sense but rather a strategic debacle, a type of
self-defeat. It is on the skids precisely where it thought itself invincible.
To prepare for tomorrow’s war it must look beyond the end of its nose
if it is to see as far as the next crisis. NATO resembles the dinosaurs
which didn’t see the comet coming that ended their reign and contin-
ued to graze. And it is at this moment that France has chosen to rejoin
the herd!
Although this war is obscure, defeat would be another thing alto-
gether. Our leaders have rediscovered a sad fact: after the fog of war
comes the fog of peace. In this situation in order not to risk our future
there is no other choice but to weigh a diplomatic and moral debacle
against a military and financial defeat; and too bad for the future of the
Afghan women and girls subjected to religious obscurantism. In other
words, to leave ‘AfPak’ and contain the fire from the outside, as was the
case with the USSR under containment. This is a political decision that
would sound the death-knell of the right to interfere so beloved of our
experts, but it is that or lose even more. Do our leaders have the cour-
age for it? They will have to rediscover the principle of necessity which
in 1951 led President Truman, pressed by General MacArthur, to
2
General William Westmoreland (1914-2005) was the commander of American troops in
Vietnam between 1964 and 1968.

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make a decision whether or not to cross the 38th parallel a second

time, cross the Yalu River and bomb China. As he explained in his
memoirs, the Communist threat had not reached the extent of justify-
ing a massacre of Chinese civilians.

The ruins of the post-9/11 strategy

George W. Bush declared total war the day after the 11 September
2001 attacks; Barack Obama has to avoid total defeat. How is he to
leave on a high? Now that the rhetoric on the Global War On Terror
has been officially abandoned by the White House and the State De-
partment, the considerable, perhaps irreparable damage caused by this
deception is apparent. For politicians and intellectuals it consisted of
giving terrorism the status of a determinant of history. But the mere
abandonment of an acronym cannot by itself change the spirit of a
nation. The utopian idea of total control of the world, inherited from
Laplace,3 is too deeply anchored in American culture for it to adopt the
idea of strategic restraint and small wars. It is nevertheless clear that, by
thinking too globally, America is failing when confronted by the local
thinking which wins local wars. It is also useless to invent a universal
enemy, who is no doubt grateful for the honour done to him, to justify
a universal war. The result is once again an immense mess, a word also
used by President Obama in the context of the Guantanamo concen-
tration camp.
Speaking of Guantanamo, this has become the symbol of the Bush
nightmare and has sapped the world’s faith in the American ‘cargo
cult’.4 It is nevertheless just the tip of the iceberg and is a symbol of a
long-standing American policing culture which had lain dormant until
then. French consternation was great when, following 11 September
2001, the Americans fell into the same pitfall as France had during the
Algerian War. Certainly, torture can help to prevent attacks. But its use

3
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) formalized the concept of absolute determinism in its
modern and scientific form, postulating that knowledge of the world would one day enable us
to foresee the future as an extension of the past and the present, and that the pursuit of knowl-
edge would be transformed into the pursuit of power.
4
A myth of the South Pacific islands which, after the Second World War, became a veritable
religion with altars and ceremonies around the ‘stars and stripes’, in the expectation of the
return of Americans dispensing riches after their landings in 1942 en route for Japan, and their
sudden departure three years later.

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prevents countries which institutionalize it from proclaiming the values

of freedom and the rule of law. America, in its blind utilitarianism,
cannot see that Guantanamo, although closed, will remain an indelible
stain on American history.
The French have never realized that these ideas have long been held
by Americans, and the Guantanamo connection will not disappear
along with the camp. America already has an annex at Bagram, in Af-
ghanistan, and plans exist for unlimited detention which will enable
‘unlawful combatants’ to be held without trial. America will remain
America. And our intellectuals, who seek wisdom in Tocqueville while
leaving aside his warnings on the growth of a new despotism and see
‘democracy’ wherever Viscount Alexis wrote ‘America’, are ready to
justify the unjustifiable in order to preserve their vision of America.
Since Condorcet applauded the repression of riots in the late eight-
eenth century, French intellectuals have always been dogged by an ill-
concealed penchant for authoritarianism.
This does not, however, apply to French public opinion, for which
the very idea of detention without trial bears the stamp of the ancien
régime, in other words an emergency law. The Guantanamo camp was
set up without legislative backing or protection against the abuse of
constitutional process, with the double blessing of Congress and a Su-
preme Court which had been thought to be more sensitive than that.
The presidential regime made possible something which would have
been unthinkable in our European parliamentary democracies. What
the French do not grasp is that the Bush years were not a kind of black
hole in which the America of Jefferson and Roosevelt were briefly for-
gotten. America had not changed. The persistent refusal to see this is
leading us straight into a Euro-American confrontation.
The Guantanamo issue will rebound on Barack Obama. If he de-
molishes the camp public opinion will accuse him of being un-
American. If he retains the principle Europe will balk at a grand trans-
atlantic reconciliation. Wavering is already discernable in the attitudes
of the most Americanophile of its leaders.

An improbable alliance

At a time when France is returning to NATO by the back door and its
diplomats sport the radiant look of a bride just back from honeymoon,

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signs that all is not entirely well between the two countries were evident
during Barack Obama’s visit to Normandy for the recent D-Day
commemorations. The tight-lipped declarations and hesitant attitudes
contrasted with the enthusiasm of previous American visits. The con-
formity of French policy was not enough to hide the gap between
France and the United States, and all the talk of reconciliation only put
off the moment of truth.
Consider just the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which
the United States has up to now desperately tried to isolate from the
rest of the Middle Eastern crises when it is in fact at the heart of them.
It is not enough to evoke the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians, as
Barack Obama did in his Cairo speech on 3 June 2009, if you then
applaud the Israeli Prime Minister and his plan for a Palestinian ‘Ban-
tustan’, and allow the Jewish state—for it now claims that title—to
continue the theft of Arab lands, the precursor to a new Trail of Tears.5
And we have not even touched on the question of the boundaries of a
future Palestinian state, which the United States is prepared to see re-
drawn and subject to conditions, whereas for France this is a matter of
law and non-negotiable, originating clearly (just like Kosovo?) in Presi-
dent Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1917 and in the only recognized
frontiers today, i.e. those existing before the Six-Day War in 1967.
Unless the seizing of land by force is to be made legal again at this un-
certain beginning of the twenty-first century, how is France ever going
to be able to accept what we already know of American plans to change
the frontiers of a non-existent state? Perhaps if, at least, France could
recognize itself in the new American approach to the Arab-Muslim
world. But how can it associate itself with Barack Obama’s Cairo proc-
lamations, which only accept Islam to the extent it resembles America,
and which make the differences the source of all the conflicts? Nothing
new there, because since the Declaration of Independence in 1776
Americans have only accepted others in the context of the abolition of
differences, contrary to the French Declaration of 1789 which, in the

5
The name given by historians to the deportation of American Indian tribes to West of the
Mississippi, authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and which began the following year
with the Cherokees. Tocqueville was present at the first forced marches, horrified by the geno-
cide taking place and scandalized by the Americans’ puritanical conscience (see Démocracie en
Amérique and Quinze Jours dans le Désert). This ethnic cleansing ended in 1859 with the defeat
of the Seminoles in Florida, whose 2,000 warriors tied down 40,000 soldiers, a war which cost
the American Treasury $19 million at the time.

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spirit of the Enlightenment, made difference the basis for equality in

law.
There are many subjects on which the French believe they speak the
same language as the Americans. And over nearly two and a half centu-
ries the quid pro quo has lasted: France thinks it has made a love
match; America has only ever made a marriage of interests. So long as
the French refuse to listen to or to read what the Americans say and
write, and fail to see that behind the more or less cordial disagreement
there is a real mismatch, they will progress from disappointment to
anger. In Afghanistan as elsewhere, an alliance cannot be built on a
false image.

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