Knowing history can indeed help us avoid being "condemned to repeat
it"--though as often as not only by making new, more interesting
mistakes. But how can we explain a case of two peoples who seem
compelled both to remember and relive an experience they would much
rather forget?

Barely three decades after fighting one of the bitterest of all
colonial wars, France and Algeria are again embroiled in conflict.
The rhetoric in both countries constantly recalls what some now term
"The First Algerian War", but even while they deplore their plight
they cannot help falling into familiar roles: the Algerians in a
fratricidal civil war, the French supporting a discredited regime to
avoid a still worse alternative. With bombs set by Algerian Islamists
exploding across the country and armed soldiers patrolling the
streets of Paris, France's drift toward a deepening confrontation
will continue along the path of least resistance. As it does so,
America will have to be deaf to appeals to join in a new crusade
against resurgent Islam. There are indeed lessons to be learned from
the first Algerian War that may yet help us to keep out of the
second, but learning them requires confronting something even more
intractable than the vaunted "Green Peril": our own ingrained
attitudes toward Arabs and Islam.

Most Americans first learned of the Algerian conflict when Islamist
rebels hijacked an Air France jetliner last Christmas Eve. Many were
then surprised to learn that at least thirty thousand people had been
killed there since a military regime seized power three years before;
that if the rebels were to win, hundreds of thousands of refugees
were expected to head north for Europe; and that the French
government therefore considered Algeria--not Bosnia or nuclear
testing--to be the gravest problem it faced.

More Searing Than Vietnam

An introduction to Algeria must begin with its nearly eight-year war
for independence, when perhaps as much as 5 percent of its population
was killed while another 10 percent fled the country when peace came
in 1962. The Algerian War is often compared with America's Vietnam
War. In both cases Westerners marshaled superior military power and
prevailed on the battlefield, only to lose the political struggles at
home and abroad. French and Americans each talked about winning
"hearts and minds", but found in the end that their own hearts were
not in it. Both suffer from historical "syndromes" that differ in
their symptoms but are alike in the stubborn persistence of their
effects.

Yet as important as Vietnam has been for America it hardly approaches
what Algeria has meant for France. Imagine, to begin with, that
Saigon was four hundred miles from San Francisco rather than eight
thousand. Suppose that South Vietnam was another constituent state of
the union, no different from Alaska or Hawaii, in the same way that
Algeria was constitutionally a part of France. Add a million American
settlers. Then we might begin to see why this was a very different
war, much worse even than the one we are still recovering from. But
even then it would surely beggar the imagination to believe that,
after our erstwhile bitter enemies had made themselves into a
Westernized elite, lost democratic elections, and confronted a new
insurgency, we would promptly become their main backers--sending arms
and advisors, and assuring billions of dollars in aid each year.
French diplomacy is often thought to be unprincipled and pragmatic to
a fault, but it is not usually considered perverse. Why is it then
that France risks reprising one of the most miserable episodes of its
recent past?

History never actually repeats itself--though, as one historian has
suggested, it sometimes rhymes. Before considering the uncanny
similarities between the first and second Algerian Wars we should
stress the differences, starting with how each began.

Before the All Saints Day uprising in 1954, the French appeared to
have their Algerian départements well in hand, subverting through
stolen elections even the limited democracy allowed the Muslim
majority. Thepresent conflict, on the other hand, came after the
victors of that war, the National Liberation Front (or FLN, its
French acronym), finally allowed political liberalization following a
week of bloody rioting against austerity in October 1988. In the
first freely contested local elections in June 1990, more than half
those who voted opted for the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which
lacked a detailed political program but appeared as a principled and
effective opponent of a corrupt regime. The first round of national
elections in December 1991 revealed that FIS support was not simply a
protest vote. Though their backers were fewer--3.26 as opposed to 4.3
million in the local races--FIS candidates still prevailed over every
other party in all but a handful of districts. Rather than risk
another round of voting, the Algerian military forced the FLN
president to resign, outlawed the FIS, and declared martial law.
Clashes between the army and Islamists ensued, and the fighting now
rivals the first Algerian War in sheer ferocity. But in this case the
conflict was initiated by the military rather than the "rebels"--who
would otherwise have been Algeria's first democratically-elected
government. (For the sake of comparison, recall that the FLN had
fewer than three thousand members when the first Algerian War began.)

As for the French, there is not yet any question of their directly
fighting the Islamists beyond France's own borders, and the decision
to continue the war or pursue peace will ultimately be made in
Algiers, not Paris or Washington. The fate of government partisans in
the event of defeat is even more uncertain than was that of French
army officers and settlers in the former conflict. Intent on
regaining international prestige, Charles de Gaulle risked the
attempts of the latter to assassinate him and overthrow the republic,
in order to extricate France from Algeria. The government in Algiers
in the 1990s, on the other hand, has a much more narrow focus and is
concerned with foreign opinion only to the extent that it helps or
hinders its war machine. We can therefore expect them to fight to the
end with still greater bitterness and brutality.

Yet the FIS cannot count on anything like the international support
its predecessors enjoyed. In the first Algerian War the elites of
what was just beginning to be called the Third World, the French
intellectual monde, and mainstream Western opinion all saw the FLN as
part of that nationalist, anti-colonialist wave--what Harold
MacMillan was to describe as "the wind of change"--that would sweep
the world by the early 1960s. They received arms from the Arab world,
Eastern Europe, and China, benefited from bases in neighboring
Tunisia and Morocco, and enjoyed diplomatic recognition by dozens of
other states. In contrast, the support offered the FIS by the
supposed "Islamic international" is trivial, while countries across
North Africa cooperate in hunting them down. They enjoy scant
sympathy from foreign intellectuals, for whom the plight of Salman
Rushdie is far more gripping than that of thousands of tortured
Islamists around the Arab world--many of whom are equally innocent of
anything more than "thought crime." Finally, while an FIS victory is
usually seen as inevitable, it is never represented in the
triumphalist terms of the 1950s by Western commentators. Instead,
most tell their audiences to expect another Iran.

Historical analogies are useful not for the answers they provide, but
for the questions they provoke. Unfortunately, analogies are more
often used as substitutes for analysis, and phrases like "another
Iran"--or "another Vietnam"--fill the mind with images that crowd out
critical thinking. We tend to jump to the answer "never again",
without asking how it happened in the first place and whether the
comparison is relevant or revealing. The American obsession with the
Iranian revolution--which many Sunni, Arab Islamists themselves see
as a failure, one they intend to learn from--has caused us to neglect
Algeria's own recent past, which both the French and the FIS find to
be far more germane. In deciding whether peace with Islamic activists
is desirable or even possible, we must at least consider whether we
are falling into a self-defeating pattern in the way we project our
preconceived notions onto the Arab and Muslim "other." However much
present predicaments seem to mirror that history, the future will
surely be different--it always is.

Even if neither the French nor the Americans can by themselves decide
the outcome in Algeria, their determination to try could make an
enormous difference in terms of relations with a successor regime.
Thus, more than fifteen years after the fall of the Shah, Washington
is still snarling at Tehran, while Paris finds moderates to support
and sees hope for continued democratization. Ironically, their
respective policies toward Islamic revivalism in Algeria are very
nearly the reverse of their postures toward Iran, with Americans
hopeful that this time it might be possible to avoid the enmity of an
Islamist Algeria.

Demons in the French Psyche

Given the effect of our Vietnam experience, we might well ask why the
French are not rallying to the cry of "No More Algerias." The reason
is not that they have forgotten the war, but rather resides in the
peculiar way they remember and rationalize it. Like those Americans
who claim the peace movement ended the Vietnam War (with the
Vietnamese themselves sometimes conceded a supporting role), most
recall the Algerian War as a domestic political struggle or
individual crisis of conscience, rather than a full-fledged war
against an indefatigable adversary. In a recent poll only 11 percent
of French respondents remembered this as an international conflict.
Indeed, Jacques Julliard, a leading intellectual historian, has
actually maintained that one "can do a history of the Algerian War
completely without speaking of Algerians."

Even North Africa specialists locate the war's origins in France's
failure to live up to its liberal ideals, squandering opportunities
to fulfill promises to promote Algeria's Muslim majority from
second-class citizenship. They and their readers can then see
themselves in a better light by remembering the war as a fight to
reclaim the true France by seeing that right was done to the
Algerians. The real adversaries then were the demons in the French
psyche, which made many ready to resort to any means to hold on to
Algeria. This explains why the French take an almost prurient
interest in supposedly taboo topics like the use of torture in
interrogations, since the campaign against a "dirty war" was one they
can claim to have won by finally conceding independence to Algeria.
From this perspective, peace was a continuation by other
means--foreign aid, cultural exchanges, teachers, and technicians
performing national service in Algeria--of the only struggle ever
worth waging: for the God of Reason and the Rights of Man (or,
another version, for continued French economic and cultural
influence, part of la gloire of a reborn great power).

It is understandable then that, more than three decades later, the
French are prepared to intervene to support secular and republican
principles in their former possession, even if it means opposing the
winners of Algeria's first free elections. The military regime that
usurped this mandate must be given a chance--both Gaullists and
Socialists argue--or there will be no hope for democracy, economic
development, and (not least) continued French influence in the chaos
and intolerance that would attend an FIS victory. Whoever holds
power, Algeria's rapid population growth, inadequate resources, and
an industrial sector designed along Stalinist lines will require more
foreign trade and investment, not a rejection of all things Western.
Above all, a mass emigration of Algeria's relatively well-off,
educated elite would deprive the country of precisely those people it
most needs to surmount these problems, while causing an exodus of
biblical proportions toward southern Europe.

The French acknowledge the irony involved in backing the Algerian
military and remnants of the old revolutionary elite against a new
insurgency. What most do not realize is that supporters of another
government in Algiers forty years ago began by using these same
arguments. Though few now care to remember, these were not just
marginal figures like the European colonists, renegade army officers,
and right-wing extremists, but also numbered some of France's
foremost socialists, liberals, and former resistance fighters. Like
their contemporary counterparts, everyone from the communists to Jean
Marie Le Pen (already a voluble member of the National Assembly)
pointed to population growth and limited resources as requiring
closer connections between France and Algeria, whatever wrongs had
been committed in the past. Though the colonists came in for
criticism, all agreed that their expulsion would cripple the
country--and for very much the same reason the Algerian elite is now
judged indispensable.

However much they differed on who was to blame for the war and how
far reforms had to go to end it, both left and right agreed that the
worst course would be to yield power outright to their adversaries.
The FLN were then seen not as Algerian nationalists but as Muslim
fanatics seeking to eradicate foreign influences and form the
vanguard of an Arab world united against the West. So when the
Defense Ministry's official review--Revue Militaire
d'Information--ran a special issue on Algeria in March 1956, its
editorial asserted that the revolt was motivated by a religious
appeal--a "holy war, the terrible jihad of Islam"--and had found a
popular response as a "revenge against the crusades." Similarly, the
resident minister's first "Directive Générale" to French officers in
Algeria, dated May 19, 1956, argued that

"what is happening in Algeria is but one aspect of a gigantic world
conflict in which certain Muslim countries, before collapsing into
disorder, seek by Hitlerian methods to establish an aggressive
dictatorship over a part of the African continent."

Concessions to such implacable adversaries would therefore amount to
appeasement. This was not just a matter of military excess: In the
Foreign Ministry's briefing book on Algeria--what they called their
"bible"--the authors maintained that while, "In its official
statements and position papers directed at international public
opinion the [FLN] is careful not to appear in any way fanatical", in
its actions it "reveals its true nature as a furious wave of
fanaticism and xenophobia directed against the West." In words that
anticipated much contemporary talk about "conflicts of
civilizations", the authors concluded that this "Pan-Islamic" and
"Pan-Arab" insurrection in Algeria took on global significance as
"one part of the fight by the peoples of Africa and Asia. . .against
the West."

Liberals and conservatives alike therefore could excuse the excesses
of the army as justified by the magnitude of the danger. To American
arguments that repression was radicalizing the resistance movement
and that France should instead open a dialogue with their more
moderate opponents, they replied that continued attacks during
negotiations revealed either the bad faith of the rebels or their
inability to conclude and carry out a peace agreement. Similarly,
opponents of the FIS now drown out calls for a dialogue by claiming
that its political leadership either will not or can not control the
insurgents.

If the French today advance many of the same arguments that they made
forty years ago, it does not necessarily mean that they are all
fallacious. Indeed, one might even assert that the most die-hard
defenders of Algérie française have in some ways been proven
right--and reading conservative papers like Le Figaro one can
sometimes detect a note of bitter satisfaction. But from an
historical perspective we can see that they are right in the same way
that a stopped clock is stunningly accurate exactly twice a day,
because the underlying attitudes toward Arabs and Islam from which
many of their views arise are virtually unchanged after forty years.
Now and in the future we shall do better with an analysis that allows
for moving parts, complexity, and paradoxes.

Some arguments obviously say more about French insecurities than
their adversaries' shortcomings--like the charge that FIS members are
incorrigible xenophobes who want to turn back the clock. In the 1950s
the French said much the same thing about the FLN--at the same time
that they themselves were making a major issue of preserving
traditional French village life from the insidious influence of Coca
Cola and James Dean. As it turned out, the Algerians' headlong,
state-directed industrialization after independence showed that they
were only too eager to "modernize." Even during the war the French
were forced to admit that their opponents had a knack for exploiting
new technologies in the propaganda war--whether in Algeria itself,
with clandestine transmitters and transistor radios, or in Europe and
America, by persuading television journalists to begin filming the
first living-room war. The Islamists have also surprised observers
with their sophisticated use of electronic communications, much as
exiled Iranian mullahs made themselves heard in the 1970s with audio
tapes. Moreover, the FIS has had considerable success in recruiting
among the young, well-educated, and technically-trained. In each
case, Algerians have embraced some elements of Western "modernity"
while resisting others. Even if the FIS aimed to shut out Western
influence it would hardly be possible, since Algeria's proximity to
Europe would make it even tougher to control new means of
communications than it has been for the Iranians, whose efforts have
been thwarted by the satellite dish.

Another leitmotif in Western attitudes toward Arabs is that they are
a volatile, excitable people who need a heavy, steadying hand from
outside to maintain a semblance of order. During the Algerian War
official propaganda constantly stressed the supposed lawlessness in
Algeria before the colonial conquest began in 1830, implying that it
would quickly return to barbarism but for the French. They were not
above deliberately distorting history to make the point--as when one
official, reading a briefing paper for the French cause, complained
that it presented Algeria under Muslim rule "as a relatively
organized state, rather than the anarchic situation upon which we
really ought to insist." Nowadays many assume that Algeria will be
plunged into disorder without continued Western aid and
Western-minded elites. For the moment, they can point to the factious
state of the Islamists to support that case.

Negotiating With Insurgents

Yet if the rebels do not present a united front, neither do their
adversaries--not in Algiers, nor in Paris. Just as French moderates
were often sabotaged by military and colonialist hardliners in
attempts to settle the Algerian War, President Liamine Zeroul is
undermined by members of his own military when he tries to talk to
the FIS. When French diplomats under Alain Juppé began to favor
negotiations they were stymied by the opposition of then Interior
Minister Charles Pasqua, reprising the Foreign and Interior
Ministries' roles during the original Algerian drama. The terrorist
Secret Army Organization formed by French colonists to thwart the
1962 peace settlement may yet have its counterpart in the Algerian
death squads that are already carrying out reprisals against the
Islamists.

One lesson to be learned by comparing the two conflicts is that the
tactical requirements of insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare
work against the maintenance of a disciplined chain of command for
either the rebels or the forces of order. If either side expects to
be presented with perfectly representative negotiating partners, with
control of all the elements comprising their side, they will have a
long wait, during which time a murderous repression will lead
combatants on both sides to splinter and grow still more extreme.
Moreover, in continuing and even intensifying operations during
negotiations the FIS has simply taken a page from the old FLN (and
Vietnamese communist) playbook, the page that says: Do not stop
applying pressure when it appears you are beginning to prevail. But
the principal reason why talks between Zeroul and the FIS failed last
year was that the government tried to use them to drive a wedge
between the Islamists' political leadership and the more extreme
insurgents. Ignoring the armed bands--either by isolating them from
the politicians or by ignoring the FIS altogether to work with other
parties--will simply force the rebel leaders to prove their
revolutionary bona fides and to shoot their way to the table. As is
usually the case in negotiation, the beginning of wisdom would be for
both sides to understand the problems of the other party and to be
prepared to make concessions, in order that each may retain the
confidence of its constituents.

Unfortunately, when anyone proposes trying to devise a peaceful
transition, appealing to the rebels' sense of reason and
reconstructing a community of interests among all Algerians, they are
usually shouted down: "What of the atrocities, the assassination of
priests, the killing of children in schools? How can one be
reasonable with such men?" This argument is often made by former
members of the FLN, forgetting that their forces also murdered
priests, burned schools, and massacred women and children in the war
for independence. French propagandists put these incidents to good
use, playing on Western suspicions that wanton fanaticism is
intrinsic to Islam. In the 1950s, they compiled photograph albums of
the FLN's most grotesque crimes, albums virtually identical to those
the Algerian government now shows foreign journalists. But in both
cases these present only a partial view. Whether one speaks of the
French of forty years ago or the current military regime, security
forces in Algeria have been no less fanatical than their adversaries.
There are reports accusing the government of summarily executing
hundreds of civilians who were suspected of sympathizing with--or
just being related to--the rebels, and stories relating to the
castration of captured rebels, and the use of napalm on such a scale
that the fires sometimes spill over into Tunisia. Few in Algeria now
doubt that the government commits some of the worst atrocities and
attributes them to its Islamist adversaries.

It is tempting to dismiss the ultra-violence of all sides as
"senseless", as mere "savagery", and so avoid trying to understand
the motives and the meaning of acts the media present as pure
spectacle. Following the hijacking of the Air France jet last
December, French news magazines like Le Point provided page after
page of gripping narrative, wrenching images, and elaborate diagrams
explaining the success of the elite commando unit. The only thing
missing was an analysis of the Algerians' reasons for targeting
France in the first place--the fact, for instance, that Paris sees to
it that the Algiers regime is bankrolled with three billion dollars
in foreign aid each year. It was therefore understandable, if
idiotic, that the editors went on to proclaim that "the
fundamentalist terrorists have forced France to get involved." The
media never did question the French government's claim--based on an
"anonymous tip"--that the hijackers were on a suicide mission (though
it would seem that, while fighting off the police for at least ten
minutes and with four sticks of dynamite readily at hand, they were
quite capable of causing many more casualties). But in succeeding
weeks they did finally begin to scrutinize French policy and the
prospects for disengagement. The hijackers therefore succeeded in
what they sought to do all along--just as their death threats against
foreigners have succeeded in making Algeria's oil and gas industry an
increasingly risky investment, and the assassination of journalists
has undermined the government's propaganda machine. In each case, and
without for a moment excusing the war crimes of either side, one can
discern a rational strategy.

Alternatively, as long as one luxuriates in righteous indignation at
the FIS, or the Algerian military, or both, there is little more one
can say or do. But until now those arguing for negotiations with the
FIS have borne the burden of proof while critics have either failed
to suggest no alternatives to a bloody stalemate or have proposed
fantasies--like the idea that Algerians can rally against both the
Islamists and the military by forming a third, independent force.
They can point to the ten thousand who marched in Paris last December
to demonstrate their "solidarity with the Algerian people." This
rather vague slogan suited everyone from the Anarchists--who perhaps
sense an opportunity for growth--to, more seriously, the Berbers--who
make up approximately 20 percent of the population of Algeria and
fear the FIS will push Arabization even further than did the FLN. But
the most visible and vocal demonstrators were women who, like the
Berbers, have not had it easy in Algeria and see things going from
bad to worse.

Does this really have the makings of a coalition that can take on
both the FIS and the Algerian Army at the same time? Sadly, no. The
turnout for the demonstration was not particularly impressive when
one considers that eight hundred thousand Algerians live in France,
and that much of the crowd was made up of non-Muslims. Regulars from
the Marxist-Environmentalist Faction were joined by many more who
simply do not like what is happening in Algeria, without having any
new suggestions as to what to do about it. Their position is like
that of Albert Camus, who also tried to unite all "men of good will"
during the Algerian War only to discover that he had been manipulated
by the FLN. His was a principled stand, but not a practical one: the
idea that one can make peace without, or in spite of, the main
combatants has always been a mirage, one that appears more real the
greater the distance from Algeria.

What Sort of Algeria?

If the FIS comes to power, either through a compromise peace or the
sudden collapse of the current regime, what could we expect in the
aftermath? After the First Algerian War in 1962 there was fighting
between different factions of the FLN, which also proved either
unwilling or unable to honor the guarantees that it had given for the
safety of the European colonists and those Muslims who had sided with
the French. Similarly, even before the 1992 crackdown some members of
the FIS indicated they would have little consideration for human
rights or democratic practices. Having been deprived of the offices
they won in free elections they are even less likely to respect
liberal principles, whatever they might feel it necessary to promise
in their campaign for Western sympathy. But the key question to ask
is not how to secure an iron-clad guarantee of good conduct by the
rebels, since there can be no such thing. Rather, it is how to
convince the FIS that it is in its own interest to head off a mass
exodus of the Algerian elite. Even the influential Sudanese leader,
Hassan El Tourabi, who has been one of the FIS's main supporters,
warns against a forceful takeover that would cause "three or perhaps
four million Algerians to flee." By exaggerating the danger Tourabi
betrayed a genuine concern. The Islamists, at least, are aware of the
obvious contradiction between the two worst case scenarios suggested
by their opponents: Algeria may soon become a powerful Islamic state
or it may lose its educated cadres in a mass exodus towards Europe,
but it is hard to see how both can happen at the same time. One thing
that is clear is that the longer the repression continues the less
likely it is that the FIS will be in a forgiving mood when it finally
takes power, which even an analyst like Olivier Roy--whose book
attempts to prove The Failure of Political Islam--now concedes is
inevitable.

What are Algeria's long-range prospects under an FIS government? The
country faces economic, environmental, and social problems of
staggering proportions--including foreign debt service that absorbs
70 percent of all export earnings, an agricultural sector that
provides less than half of required foodstuffs, and rapid population
growth that each year adds hundreds of thousands of youths to an
unemp loyment role that already constitutes at least 25 percent of
the work force. But what Algeria under the FIS may lose in terms of
an educated elite and Western aid it can gain through a political
system with popular legitimacy--not because all its policies will be
wise, but because it could at least implement them and so exit from
the political impasse. Thirty years ago the FLN was in a much better
position than its predecessors in calling for sacrifices to overcome
economic and social problems of comparable proportions. Now, with its
mass following and emphasis on integrity in government, the FIS is
more likely to be able to undo the FLN's mistakes than a military
regime that lacks any mandate. Anarchy is the inevitable result not
of allowing Algerians to govern themselves, but of denying them that
right.

Outlawing the FIS has been a colossal blunder. As King Hassan of
Morocco has observed, the FIS can now continue to claim the popular
mandate without ever having to handle the intractable problems that
would make alternatives more attractive. Recognizing this, one of the
FIS' harshest critics, the pseudonymous CIA analyst Edward Shirley,
concedes that "it might be better to sweat out the fundamentalist
fever sooner rather than later" (Foreign Affairs May/June 1995).

By this past spring signs began to appear that even the French had begun to accept that conclusion. Whereas before they attacked American motives in meeting with the Islamists -- much as they once suspected the United States of secretly favoring the FLN -- they now joined Washington in welcoming talks between the FIS and secular opposition parties. Under President Chirac, with Pasqua out and Juppe prime minister, they halted ill-disguised military support. Yet even now there is no question of conditioning French economic aid on the willingness of the military regime to move toward a compromise. Anyone proposing such a policy now would risk being accused of caving in to the FIS' bombing campaign, in addition to precipitating a sudden collapse in Algeria and a massive outflow of refugees. Thus, fear of one day facing the "Who lost Algeria?" question still causes policy paralysis.

True and False Realism

Against this background, what then should America do? It may well be too late for France to escape the full brunt of an Islamist backlash and boatloads of refugees, but we need not all go down with the ship. This would surely be the result of following the advice of analysts like Daniel Pipes, Judith Miller, and Edward Shirley, for whom Algeria is seen as simply a test case of America's ability to take on the Islamist threat. Though they differ on details and none fails to distinguish between Islam as a faith and "Islamic fundamentalists", all agree that the State Department is wrong to engage them in a dialogue, and argue -- as Pipes does in his recent article for The National Interest -- that "there are no moderates."

Yet, as John Esposito shows in his book The Islamic Threat (Oxford University Press, 1992), Americans no less than the French tend to underplay the historical processes and present-day problems that arouse Islamic activists' extremism. More sophisticated writers simply ignore the inconvenient chronology of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Israel, where fanatical violence followed the frustration of other forms of expression and bloody repression. Others stoop to the most offensive stereotypes, like Shirley, who writes that the Islamists are successful since they offer young Muslim men what they have always wanted, "wealth and women", without the guilt -- a notion that is as incredible as it is inexplicable. Islamists' anger is thus made to appear inescapable -- if not in the blood -- and the reader is invited to conclude that talking to them can only amount to "appeasement."

To complete his portrait of Islamists as "totalitarians" who -- like the communists and fascists before them -- "aspire to universal dominance", Pipes provides a know-your-enemy checklist of their distinguishing features, including "anti-moderate", "anti-democratic", anti-semitic", and "anti-Western." It is, of course, easy enough to "prove" that there is no such thing as moderate Islamic activism by first defining it as anti-moderate. But what Pipes provides is really "a papier-mache model made from snippets of rhetoric, with the diversity and disagreements among Islamists carefully cut away. Rather than engage in an inconclusive exchange of contending quotes, one can cite an array of concrete actions. Iran itself has tilted in favor of the Armenian Christians against the Muslim Azerbaijanis, and has cut back on aid to Sudan. Even Miller found Tourabi and the Shi'ite leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah feuding with their putative ally in Tehran (Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994). All three despise the Saudi Wahhabis -- "anti-moderate" in internal policy but pro-Western in foreign affairs, though they aided Algerian Islamists until just last year. Within Algeria itself, the radically differing positions of the FIS and the "Armed Islamic Group" are reflected by murderous encounters between their partisans -- a relationship that Pipes describes as "a division of labor."

At one point Pipes acknowledges that Islamists differ on tactics and ideology and that some are willing to work through the system and avoid violence, even while he still insists that "every one of them is inherently extremist." Yet even if they are equally extreme, Islamic activists are, for whatever reasons, obviously going their separate ways -- and the most inept diplomacy could exploit their conflicts. Now, as so often in the past, some "realists" are so intent on proving their toughness that they have desensitized themselves to the obvious: Nothing is more likely to make the Islamic revival a united and genuinely dangerous threat than treating it as such.

These analysts agree that America should not talk privately to Islamic activists and ought publicity to oppose the whole idea of political Islam (our Saudi allies notwithstanding). As a guide to our actions, Pipes suggests that we follow the lead of nonactivist Muslims. Yet he could not wish that in the case of Algeria. Last January nearly all of the secular parties, including the Berbers and the FLN, met with the FIS under the auspices of the Catholic Community of Sant'Egidio. They agreed on a set of principles both to end the war and keep the peace, including the proscription of torture and terrorism, and a national conference to organize new elections. While it is impossible to know which way Algerians would now vote, those who have agreed that they ought to have a chance to opt for the FIS represent parties that accounted for nearly 90 percent of all votes cast in the last election. Consequently, they refused to participate in the presidential elections this past November, which therefore proved nothing so much as the government's isolation.

No matter, Miller and Pipes would deny Muslim nations the right to choose their rulers for an indeterminate period while they prove whether they can handle all the rights of a "civil society" -- in effect, "let's see how they do with training wheels." But here again, it is hard to see how this advice fits Algeria. In the period before elections, Algerians responded enthusiastically to political liberalization, forming dozens of parties and staging rallies almost daily, while the airwaves were flooded with outspoken political programming. At the time they enjoyed what Andrew Pierre and William Quandt have described as "one of the freest presses in the Arab world" (Foreign Policy, Summer 1995). Miller concedes that, after having backed repression, for us now to adopt a general policy requiring human rights before free elections would appear "unseemly." In the particular case of Algeria it would appear ridiculous. Even Pipes admits that this "shipwreck of a regime . . . . stand[s] for no ideas or visions; their leaders merely want to stay in power.' But "however corrupt, however nasty", he would still have us support them. How then is a "civil society" -- much less contested elections -- ever to emerge? When he endorses Miller's call for "elections, tomorrow and civil society today", Pipes is in effect putting off the whole problem indefinitely.

Yet to continue to debate the rightness of America's rhetorical position obscures the real issue. Whether America or France condemns or converses with Islamic activists is less important than the fact that both give billions of dollars to regimes that seek to crush them. Even in Algeria the Clinton administration has acquiesced in France's campaign for IMF loans and debt restructuring. The question is not whether we should embrace the Islamists -- no serious analyst argues for that -- but whether it is wise to continue to be accessories to their murder. Make no mistake: as long as we accept and finance "strong-arm tactics" (Pipes again), there is no evading the moral responsibility.

There may be threats so dire and so insidious as to justify abandoning our commitment to democracy, but these analysts have not even made a convincing realpolitik argument. Indeed, rather than genuine realism, their call for what would amount to a crusade against Islamism has the air of an intoxication, not unlike that of their opposite numbers. What is fanaticism, after all, if not letting the pursuit of principles become so blind as to lead us to trample them underfoot? That may explain why a seemingly sober analyst such as Pipes can accept the view that "To fight the fundamentalists one has to have been a bit like them oneself."

Algeria is one case where a truly realist policy is also the right one: We cannot support either the present Algerian regime or its Islamist opponents, but we should continue to talk to both about human rights and fair elections. To make our words carry weight, we must make continuing financial aid to Algeria contingent on progress on these two points while at the same time offering our help in negotiations to end the war. At a bare minimum, we must make clear to the French that we cannot support them in an all-out confrontation with the Algerian Islamists. It is to be hoped that this will be enough to dissuade them, though they may well decide that domestic politics will not permit a change of policy. While it is difficult to foresee the ultimate outcomes our diverging positions in the face of a exodus from a new Islamic state, just a "Scud's throw" away from France, could cause trans-Atlantic ties to snap.

If not for this ominous prospect, some might dismiss French actions in Algeria as just another example of how this self-important people cannot resist as chance to strut on the world stage. But the parallel responses of many American analysts indicate that the implications of the unfolding crisis are more profound than merely adding new tensions to a relationship that has never been relaxed. What we have found most annoying about the French are really those things that make them like ourselves -- including a sense of a national mission to be both an example to the world and an active force for good, a belief that we can know other peoples' interests better than they do themselves, and an adventurist streak in seeking to prove it to them. So while some Americans warned the French in the late 1950s that confusing Algerian nationalists with communist-would cause "another Indochina", others were even then laying the foundation for our own folly in Vietnam.

Nowadays, American pundits are already asking us to accept the full panoply of anti-communist arguments, dusted off and repolished for the new opponent. These include the totalitarian model for our enemies (fundamentalists are like communists who were like Nazis), the old apology for embarrassing allies (only our dictatorships can evolve into democracies), and the domino theory for backing them to the bitter end (as Algeria goes so goes North Africa, then the Gulf, then . . . the world). But before remounting the Cold War-horse, we ought to examine on a country-by-country basis whether such a commitment conforms to our real interests. Perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt, for instance, would be so costly to us as to justify continuing to throw good money after bad, but we should have that debate now rather than the day we face the same Hobson's choices as the French. And if, after all, we find it difficult to resist the allure of a new crusade, before surrendering let us first ask ourselves whether we are not beginning to resemble a certain gentleman from La Mancha.