Bush, Napoleon And The Crusades

(CBS)  Tom Fenton, in his fourth decade with CBS News, has been the network's Senior European Correspondent since 1979. He comments on international events from his "Listening Post" in London, and other parts of the world as well.

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Is the United States winning or losing the military campaigns that the Bush Administration calls The War on Terror?

Don't ask journalists. Their hair-trigger judgments, tuned to instant analysis, instinctively reach for easy analogies. Vietnam is the obvious one. "Quagmire" is the word that springs to their minds if the campaigns in Afghanistan or Iraq seem to be bogging down.

Many journalists were wrong in the initial phases of both campaigns, and then reversed their judgments when the regimes of both countries were toppled with relative ease. Their snap conclusions went from serious mistake to piece of cake. So don't ask journalists how the war is going.

It may be more useful to ask historians how the war is likely to go in the long run. Historians take the long view.

Henry Laurens, an eminent French specialist on the Arab world, points to Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt (1798-1801). The three-year body count was 11,500 French soldiers and tens of thousands of Egyptian civilians.

For the record, the French went in posing as liberators, proclaiming their goal was to free the Egyptians from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Impoverished, backward, Arabs would welcome French soldiers and the revolutionary ideas they brought.

The Egyptian Campaign started off well. The big cities of Cairo and Alexandria fell rapidly. But the French occupation was heavy-handed. Egyptian cultural and family values were violated.

An Islamic resistance movement grew. Remnants of the old regime began a guerilla campaign in the countryside, and in the cities several insurrections had to be harshly repressed. The war widened, and the French finally lost Egypt against the forces of the British and the Ottomans.

France went on to wage other Arab campaigns - in Algeria in 1830 and Syria in 1917, again posing as liberators. The Arabs of course saw the French as imperialists and, even worse, hypocrites.

Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, famous for his prophetic article a decade ago on "The Clash of Civilizations," is equally pessimistic about Western attempts to "reform" the Arab world.

Huntington sees the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the beginning of a war between the West and Islam that is progressively destabilizing the world. He says a small group of Islamic militants, organized in networks that strike at Western interests, is globalizing the clash of civilizations. According to Huntington, the American occupation of Afghanistan and of Iraq, has spread, rather than contained, the war.

He faults American and Western political leaders for believing that the collapse of communism would usher in a new order in which the rest of the world would embrace freedom, democracy and the liberal culture of the West. That vision, he says, is "totally false."

Huntington is convinced that the war in Iraq was a bad idea. Before it began, he predicted it would be two wars. The war against Saddam Hussein and his army would be quickly won, but the war against the Iraqi people, which is now taking an increasing toll of American lives, the United States "will never win."

These two serious historians, one French and one American, both have grave doubts about the Bush "crusade" to democratize the Arab world.

The President, of course, no longer uses the "C" word because of its negative connotations for Arabs, who still remember the Crusaders' bloody capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

There is another word from the Eleventh Century that still resonates. "Assassins" were members of a Moslem terrorist sect who were drugged and brainwashed to stab Christians, at the cost of their own lives. Today's suicide bombers, like Osama Bin Laden, trace their ideological roots to the time of the Crusades. History can be instructive.


By Tom Fenton