Comparison with other recent wars is interesting. Maybe Britain could simply have bribed Galtieri to withdraw from the Falklands. Maybe the UN could have bribed Saddam to pull out of Kuwait. Maybe Bush could have bribed Noriega to resign. Maybe Dudayev could have bribed Yeltsin to grant Chechnya its independence.

But… who, exactly, would we bribe in Iraq? And to do what? Who’s the enemy? What are they doing that we don’t want them to do and why? This is Question One of the Seven Questions (British Army tactical appreciation process) and we can’t even answer it.

The repression was ordered by [Maurice Papon] the same person who organized the deportation of Jew for the Nazis.

The 17th of October 1961 was a date that marked the height of the repercussions of that hatred which had thrown an ever-increasing number of Algerians whose only crime was their nationality into the murky waters of the river that flows quietly through Paris. Because it had become common practice to get rid of the bodies of Algerians – and sometimes Algerians who were still alive – who bore rather too visible signs of police brutality by depositing them in the Seine. It was way of avoiding embarrassing questions. During the summer of 1961 it was quite clear how the war was going to end and some people in France were unwilling to accept that thousands of workers with the dubious privilege of taking on all the dirty jobs, those thousands of men with swarthy features on whom they were used to venting their xenophobic spleen, should be on the point of belonging to a free, sovereign nation.

The provocation came in the form of a police order that Moslem “citizens” of Algeria only should be subject to a curfew from 8.30pm to 5.30am, on the pretext that there had been a significant increase in the number of attacks on policemen. Does it need to be pointed out that the number of these attacks, at a time when the first negotiations were signaling an end to the fighting, was tiny compared to the number of victims of “excesses” by the French police? The implications of these restrictions on the Algerian community were such that the leaders of the armed struggle in France organised a response.

For quite apart from the fact that it discriminated against Algerians, the curfew opened the way to all kinds of abuse of authority, making such abuses legal, effectively making it a crime to look like a foreigner and forcing unemployment on the countless workers who needed to go to and
As a result, history made this one of the most tragic episodes in the war of national liberation. And if the events of October 1961 were wrapped in a cloak of silence in France, doubtless because they hardly showed the French authorities in a good light, they were nonetheless the subject of various investigations by impartial observers and even nationalists who were ashamed of the wave of brutality organised by their leaders and carried on with matchless zeal by the “forces of law and order”. http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/algerians_liberte.htm

Some publications in France that tried to reveal the truth were censored. Temps Modernes, the magazine of Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher and author, called the episode “a pogrom”. Papon had the edition seized.
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/algerians_sunday_times.htm

[Sartre has been discredited to this day. And speaking of Sartre, vilified even posthumously, and not, I suspect, solely for his sexlife, sordid as it may have been, I sometimes wonder why a hothead like Alexander Cockburn is permitted to write in the pages of the neo-con NYT book review, while Noam Chomsky is a non person on its pages and everywhere else in the US mainstream media.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961

Then there was the revolt (almost) of the Generals.

But mainly I remember an atmosphere of instability, in which fear, general bad feelings and outright anger, violence, & resentment (and privation—remember they had just come out of WWII and you saw amputated veterans everywhere) were palpable. At least that is my dim recollection. I don’t think we are there yet in the USA.

…rising oil prices have “had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% – more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they [African countries] had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries.”

A central policy issue for the comma?

D’oh, yet again! Fixed now, I hope – JQ