…as flawed as ever.
"As General de Gaulle set out for the Middle East in April of 1941, he famously wrote that "towards the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas". They all did. Napoleon was going to "liberate" Cairo, and Bush and Blair were going to "liberate" Iraq; and Obama, briefly, was going to "liberate" Syria.
A magnificent book by the French Saint Cyr Military School historian Henri de Wailly, Invasion Syria 1941, has just been published for the first time in English – and at what a moment. As Stalingrad-size casualties mount in civil war Syria today, here is the story of how the French – and the British — thought they could create "modern" Lebanon and Syria by driving across the border from what was then Palestine and taking over the Levant from the 35,000 demoralised Vichy troops who had been forced since the summer of 1940 to serve Marshal Petain's pro-German collaborationist regime.
It turned out rather differently, but some things never change in the eyes of the Westerner. Here, for example, is Vichy General Tony Albord on the local Alawite and Lebanese soldiers he commanded – the Alawites, of course, being the same Shia sect to which today's President Bashar al-Assad of Syria belongs. "The Alawite soldier is capable," Albord wrote, "the Syrian simple and disciplined, but anti-authority, easily upset and uncultured. His martial spirit is reduced. The Lebanese are conscientious mercenaries, civilians dressed in military uniform. The Lebanese and Syrian middle classes have no esteem for the army; their sons must be lawyers."…"
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