I just finished reading Andrew Mueller's collection I Wouldn't Start From Here which is now officially the book that I think everyone who wants to know something about international relations or war or peace in the world should be reading. The chapters are generally short and criss cross the world in the best sort of fashion - not linked together chronologically but the flow from one to the next is spot on. Whoever organized these essays (editor or author) did a fantastic job. It will be reviewed next month in my column because I really think it is a great book for older teens (although published for adults) and I want people to know about this book.

It's witty and relevant and sometimes quite sobering while other times laugh out loud funny. From Mueller you can go on to far deeper books on singular subjects that he touches on like Northern Ireland or Iraq or Israel and Palestine or even Bono and Al Gore, each of whom he interviews. But you won't go away until the book is finished because you will really like Andrew Mueller and not want to set him aside until you have read every last page.

There was one essay that surprised me last night. Set in Paris in 2004 it is primarily an interview with Saadi Yacef, former commander of the Front Liberation Nationale. I have just been reading about Yacef in his youth, in Alistair Horne's classic A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. I did not come to Horne's book casually - I've been thinking for years that I needed to learn more about the war between France and Algeria. Then I read an essay from a BBC correspondent (also in a collection for the March column) which basically said that if you want to understand the Paris riots then you need to understand the long sad history of France and Africa and to understand that you must know about the Algerian War. But it didn't start there for me either.

When I was teaching one of the subjects my students were most curious about was Vietnam. They always wanted to know how we got involved in a war in that country. So I would explain the domino theory (ugh) but also how we followed France into the conflict. So then they wanted to know why France was in Vietnam and that meant going back to Japan and WWII and colonization in French Indochina and then forward to China and communism and the end of WWII and revolution and 1954 and Dien Bien Phu. But then they wanted to know why France didn't go back later - why they pulled out and never looked back and that was because France got seriously preoccupied elsewhere with another country. So then they wanted to know what country and I said Algeria and then there was a collective groan. Of course it was Algeria - someplace none of them knew anything about and a war no one had ever heard of. Vietnam was a war about a far bigger picture than anyone ever realized in the beginning of the class, but bit by bit, we would figure it out and at least at the end have a clue about how so many countries could play so many small parts in what turned out to be a big segment in American history.

And oh yeah - we didn't talk much at all about the Algerian War but at least they could find the country on the map.

Horne's book is finally the book I should have read ten years ago. It's not an easy read - it's very dense history with a ton of unfamiliar names and places. It's one of those titles that I read about ten pages a night but so far it is fascinating stuff and sets up a lot of background for France's ongoing problems with immigration and assimilation.

In I Wouldn't Start From Here, Mueller talks to Yacef about the movie The Battle of Algiers which sounds like mandatory viewing for pretty much every civilian and military leader engaged against a guerrilla force (since it was released in 1965 I wonder how popular it was among American and Vietnamese commanders). Several other topics also come up but here is the quote that I think needs to be painted on the wall at the Pentagon (and DOJ):

"When you torture or kill part of a family," he said, "when you torture or kill someone's son, someone's mother, all that family will be in the corner of the terrorist. You kill one. You create ten."

As it turns out Yacef is a fan of the US (one of his daughters lives here) and he was a senator in Algeria when Mueller spoke to him. But he should know how hard it is to win a war when you aren't there as soldiers. "The Americans have good soldiers. The problem is that in Iraq they're not soldiers, they're trying to be the police, like the French paratroopers in Algeria. And they've ended up torturing people just the same."

I'm sure no one thought that a loosely organized group of Algerian rebels (from a country that had been colonized by France since 1810) would defeat the French army. I'm not suggesting - at all - that the situation in Iraq today is similar but I do think there is something to learn here, and that Saadi Yacef's life is a lesson that shouldn't be ignored.

And that's just from one essay in Mueller's book. Can you imagine what the whole collection has to offer?!

[Post title from Saadi Yacef.}