I did not adopt my pen name in honor of
Sirocco (1951). This is a dull
Casablanca knock-off, casting Bogart as another jaded ex-pat with a conscience buried so deep underneath his trenchcoat that it can barely be retrieved. One of the few reviewers at
Amazon.com ranks it the 48th best of his 50 films.
Frontpaged at European Tribune, joining which is a great idea.
From Sirocco (1951). Director: Curtis Bernhardt.
Yet the plot rings oddly familiar, and not just for riding Casablanca's coattails through the clichés of exotic melodrama. The Bogart tough-guy, Harry Smith, is an American war profiteer in a Middle Eastern country ravaged by insurgency against a hamfisted Western occupant. Nick Clooney in The Cincinnati Post recounts his viewing experience so:
This was a movie made in 1951 about events that took place in the mid-1920s. As the plot unfolded, I sank deeper into my chair.
The location was Damascus, Syria. The occupying army was French. The avowed intention of France, we were told, was to establish free elections for the Syrians.
But there were "insurgents." These Syrian dissidents wanted no part of any government sanctioned by the French. They wanted only "self-determination," by which they meant that they wanted all the power themselves.
So they killed people.
In quick succession we saw on screen a popular restaurant blown up, killing occupiers and Syrians alike, then a military convoy blown up by roadside grenades, then local leaders who were cooperating with the French shot down by snipers. All these events are eerily familiar to us today.
As when taking a rook exposes you to checkmate, tactical gain can cause strategic defeat. The uprising, explains the Syrian emir, aims to provoke the French into defeating themselves by lashing out in a way that cedes the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. And of course, his men believe themselves fighting for their homeland, while their enemies know themselves fighting to retain somebody else's.
These are universal traits of de facto occupation scenarios, as the French discovered the hard way. Chirac himself was a soldier in the Algerian War - a conflict in which France had more at stake than the US in Iraq. Algeria was not only the most hard-won colonial asset of the French Republic, seized at great cost in the war of 1830-1847. It was considered a province of France itself, unlike, for instance, Morocco. Even so, France lost its will to administer and endure the required inhuman violence. And contrary to myth, that is not because the French are 'soft.'
Improbably in light of the past, the Arab street now looks to France as its defender against imperial aggression. An excellent BBC World Service documentary series from last year, France and the Arab World, explores the dealings of Paris with its clients in Damascus and Alger and its motives for assisting these undeniably oppressive regimes. To reveal the conclusions would be unkind, since all three programs can be listened to for free at the BBC site.
What is clear, though, is that France has learned a lesson the USA has not: To de facto occupy a territory whose population has a national consciousness, even a fledgling such, is incompatible with democracy. If it lasts, the situation spurs not the democratization of the occupied so much as the de-democratization of the occupant.
It is unlikely to last, however.
