The Amîr ʿAbd Al-Qâdir and the “Good War” in Algeria, 1832-1847

Abstract

American writer Nicholson Baker concludes Human Smoke, his recent book on the events leading up to the Second World War, with a question. Was it a 'good war'? he asks bluntly.1 The preceding pages, a montage like construction of quotations and historical anecdotes that deflate some commonly held understandings of the war, ensure that the reader already knows that Baker's answer is no. He argues that the Second World War's years of apocalypse and holocaust brought nothing that can be legitimately called good, especially not for the millions who lost their lives. Coming in 2008, the book provokes negative reactions from many Americans (and several British reviewers) who contemplate with weary bitterness the ever receding end of what they were told would be their generation's good in Afghanistan and Iraq, sequels to their country's earlier good wars.2 Although this polemic is of primary interest to people considering Ameri can history and memory, Baker's question itself is of value to researchers in many fields. Even if he is not an academie and his attack on the trope of the good is not made as a historian, Baker poses in a straightforward way fruitful questions that we rarely ask: What are good wars?; what are the implications for history and historiography when a given war becomes