What the French can teach Obama

A Western superpower invades a Middle Eastern country with overwhelming force, under the pretext of defending its interests in the region, but in reality to expand its empire overseas. The commander of the military expedition proclaims to the shocked and awed local population that he has come to liberate them from the oppression of their rulers, and to share Western ideals of freedom, democracy, and rights for women. He professes respect for the Islamic religion, denies any intention of waging a holy war, and announces that he expects the conquered people to welcome their liberators with open arms.

No, it’s not 2003 but 1798, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s army has just landed in Egypt.

The parallels between the French invasion of Egypt two hundred years ago and Iraq today are uncanny. The reasons advanced for the French Expedition were also geopolitical, strategic and imperialist and the enterprise was equally cloaked in idealism: the natives would be liberated from ‘Oriental despotism’, and introduced to the principles of the Enlightenment. In return, the Western superpower expected to be welcomed by the conquered Egyptians with open arms.

When the French first arrived, mindful of Bonaparte’s injunction to respect Muslim sensibilities, they aimed to win hearts and minds and walked about the streets of Cairo unarmed. Within months a series of flagrant cultural missteps and the fatal dynamics of an occupation turned the population against the foreign occupiers and forced the French to retrench behind the fortifications of the Ezbekiah, their ‘Green Zone’. Within their compound, the French tried to recreate Paris, including the Tivoli pleasure palace with theatre, dancing, music and wine, just as US forces today recreate a self-contained American environment complete with McDonald’s and video arcades.

Then as now, native interpreters, guides, and all those who served the occupier found themselves at risk of retaliation when the evacuation of the occupying army was imminent. For the French then, as for the coalition forces today, the responsibility of protecting the locals who served under them loomed large. A particularly heartbreaking dilemma faced the men and women who were caught in cross-cultural liaisons. General Menou himself, the high commander in Egypt at the time of the evacuation, was married to a Muslim woman. Many of the lesser men in his position left their Egyptian paramours behind to meet their fate, but Menou took his wife with him back to France, as some American servicemen have done with Iraqi women. An article in Time magazine last year reported the poignant personal stories of several such couples.

As the election of Barack Obama makes an eventual evacuation all but inevitable, the French expedition can serve as a model for one of several possible outcomes: what happens in the aftermath? In the case of Egypt, it was the worst case scenario that prevailed: the sectarian strife exacerbated by the occupation segued into the horrors of all-out civil war and Egypt descended into unprecedented chaos and conflict. In the vacuum, local, regional and international powers made a play for dominance and militias jockeyed for power so that yesterday’s enemies turned into today’s allies and vice versa. Hopefully, with the benefit of history, the worst case scenario can, and will, be avoided in Iraq.

Samia Serageldin is the author of The Naqib’s Daughter, a novel based on the true story of how an unscrupulous Egyptian notable pushes his daughter into a liaison with a Frenchman, and the consequences for the girl when the French leave.