In Syria, Will France Reverse Trend of Poor Military Decisions?
One-hundred years from today, the recent terrorist outrage in Paris will be relegated to distant memory, recalled vaguely if at all.
But in the here and now, the Islamic State in Syria has murdered 130 innocent civilians and wounded an additional 368. The “City of Light” has waned and flickered.
France has a long and intriguing history with Syria, as shadowy and sinister as a Humphrey Bogart movie. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, France received control of Syria and Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate. This coincided with the creation of the British mandate in Palestine.
French rule in Syria was generally unpopular and often opposed by armed insurrection. Following the defeat of France by the Nazi blitzkrieg in 1940, Syria was ruled by a government appointed by the collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Petain and Pierre Laval in Vichy, France. After five weeks of determined opposition, the Vichy garrison in Syria surrendered to British forces in 1941.
Convicted of treason after the war, Petain was sentenced to life imprisonment. Laval attempted suicide but was revived only to be shot by firing squad.
Syria and Lebanon became fully independent in 1946.
British rule in Palestine ended in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel. Relations between Syria and France have remained edgy. A bizarre complexity in all this is the French relationship with Russia, which has been bombing targets in Syria for several months. In 2011, France contracted to sell two of its “Mistral”-class helicopter carriers to the Russian navy. This would have been the first transfer of western arms to Russia since World War II. But the recent, outrageous Russian conduct in Crimea and Ukraine scuttled this deal. Under intense pressure from its NATO allies, France agreed to sell the ships to politically unstable Egypt instead. Vladimir Putin was not amused.
Finally, France has a long reputation for not learning from its military errors and defeats. This greatly predates the construction of the ineffective Maginot Line and the annihilation of French arms by the German Wehrmacht in 1940.
During the Napoleonic Era of 1793 to 1812, for example, the French navy fought numerous battles with the Royal Navy, sinking or capturing 10 British ships. But in these very same conflicts, the French lost an astonishing 377 ships. This was due mostly to the disastrous tactics of French gunnery officers, who were trained to fire at masts and riggings rather than at hulls.
Why the French never learned from this mistake boggles the mind. Hopefully, they will do better in Syria.
Joseph Tipler
Centralia
