Time Capsules: A War Between Civilizations

Chrsitopher Hedges

Taking down the decorations from the Christmas tree, my wife opened a box in which she stores ornaments and found a newspaper, used as packing material. It is a New York Times  piece from Sunday, January 1, 1995, 21 years ago.

It was from what was then my favorite section, "The Week In Review." What caught her attention was an article on page E5, "France Wages a Lonely Battle with Radical Islam."  What caught my eye was its author, Christopher Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a book published 7 years later.

The article from 1995 was about the French commando raid on an airplane hijacked by Algerian Muslims in Marseilles. The commandos killed 4 hijackers and rescued 170 passengers. 

"France frames the conflict as a clash of civilizations. It has carried the fight into the schools, where Muslim girls wearing traditional head scarves are expelled," Hedges notes. "France fears the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees, swelling the population of Algerians already living in France (now 800,000) and aggravating tensions with three million other immigrants from the third world." 

Hedges adds the French President "has repeatedly warned that Muslim radicals are making inroads among many young Arab immigrants." 

 Remember, this is 1995. 

"French officials also say they can never allow the nuclear research program in Algeria to come under the control of an Islamic state...The religious ethos of the movement has bred a self-sacrificing fanaticism that makes it crueler, less prone to compromise and harder to control."

He ends with, "The Algerian war has now been carried for the first time, to French soil. It may not be the last time."

The rest of the article contrasted the American diplomatic posture, which was then one of accommodation to radical Islam in Algeria, as a reaction to America's own errors in dealing with Iran. The Ayatollah Khomeini had taken refuge from Iran in France while America supported the oppressor of fundamentalist Muslims, the Shah, and the Americans made implacable enemies of these extremists. The Americans now counseled trying to turn away wrath with kindness. Maybe, if you gave the radicals what they wanted...

What Hedges, and the Americans could not know in 1995 is that neither the American nor the French approach would stem the tide.  The French had a clearer appreciation of the threat. 

Intriguingly, when was the last time you heard about an Algerian nuclear bomb?

Christopher Hedges later wrote about  the world of war correspondents, in particular the coverage of another war which involved Muslim vs Christian opponents, in Sarajevo.  Kurt Schork, who grew up in an adjoining town to mine in Maryland, and who married a girl from  my high school, who I and every one of the other 300 males in our class of 1965 idolized, covered Sarajevo for Reuters. He did the story of Bosko Brckic, a Serb who loved a Muslim woman, Admira Ismic, since high school. Trying to flee Sarajevo, Serb snipers cut them down; their bodies entwined a few yards away from another sniper's kill, a man shot five months earlier, decomposing,  and nobody had  felt it was safe enough to retrieve owing to unrelenting sniper fire. 

Sniper kill

The point of Hedges's book was that covering war is such an adrenalin rush, it becomes an addiction. "Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so," General George Patton said. 

Kurt Schork

It may be those young men who stream across Europe, through Turkey, to ISIS feel the same way.