The battle for Mosul is on. I have already reported, here and elsewhere, my understanding of what is at stake. Two comments, however. First, the battle was late in coming. Far too late. On this subject the Kurdish commanders whose observations I gathered and presented more than a year ago in my documentary, Peshmerga, were voices crying out in the desert. The city can and should be taken, they insisted to anyone who would listen; every hour wasted, every day spent in procrastination only strengthens the Islamic State’s capacity for defense of the city and for attacks elsewhere. My second comment is that Mosul is not Aleppo, as Marine Le Pen’s National Front cynically maintains. Yes, like Aleppo, Mosul is a cosmopolitan commercial city with a rich multimillennial history. The two cities have that in common; both are parts of humanity’s incalculably precious cultural heritage. But the battle for Mosul in no way resembles the situation in Aleppo. At the moment, in fact, the strategic and tactical principles behind the battle for Mosul are the precise opposite of those that prevail in Aleppo. And every bit of the passion for ignorance of Moscow’s party in France is required to deny that as Putin indiscriminately rains down bombs, emptying Aleppo of its inhabitants, the Iraqi-Kurdish coalition advised and assisted by the United States and France is moving with restraint into Mosul, taking care to avoid civilian casualties, and sparing the human shields behind which an embattled Daesh hides. War is still war. And it is possible, as the battle continues, that irreparable blunders will occur. But, for the time being, that has not been the case. And the truth is that, today, this war of liberation is the opposite of the urbicidal madness for which, since Grozny, the Russians have become renowned.
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What could have been going through the mind of FBI Director James Comey last Friday when, defying every rule of neutrality attached to his position, ignoring the recommendations of the Department of Justice of which his Bureau is a part, and violating the prohibition, sacrosanct in all democracies and in the United States in particular, against commenting on ongoing investigations, he decided, with the election eleven days away, to relaunch the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails? Some suspect that Comey, a Republican, wanted to give Donald Trump a last-minute boost. But his record of standing up to presidents of both parties argues against this hypothesis. Others see him as a puppet master in a gigantic political Hunger Games that would have ended in an unsurprising victory for Hillary Clinton had Comey not concocted a gripping new episode to keep up the suspense of the race. But has the American system really fallen so low that the laws of the crassest form of spectacle can explain the FBI director’s action? Still others have advanced the theory of a careerist seeking to ensure that he can’t be fired no matter who wins. But that hypothesis doesn’t hold water because Comey was appointed by Obama in 2013 for a term of ten years that cannot be shortened. So, no. The comparison that comes to mind is really that of J. Edgar Hoover, Comey’s sadly famous forebear who held on to his job for 48 years through foul play, threats, and blackmail. But that hypothesis isn’t any more reassuring than the others for a democracy that, no matter which side wins, will emerge weakened from this election.
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I met Frédéric Tissot in January 2002 in Kabul, where French President Jacques Chirac had sent me to ponder the reconstruction of Afghanistan and where, alone in an embassy deserted since the fighting of November 2001, Tissot was serving as France’s representative. Together we criss-crossed the country. We met with warlords digging out from the darkness of the Taliban. We believed we found the traces of a third Buddha in Bamiyan, this one reclining. We placed a memorial on the grave of Commander Massoud. And of the time we spent together I retain the memory of a cheerful, convivial, and incredibly courageous companion in adventure. Fifteen years later he has published L’Homme debout (Stock), a beautiful book by a man not only free but passionately engaged in his time and standing up, as the title suggests, against the spectacle of injustice. Tissot leads the reader from the refugee camps of Lebanon into the poverty-blighted fields of the Middle Atlas mountains and warring Somalia; from Kurdistan, which he knows better than anyone for having roamed it for 35 years, to Haiti, where this intrepid physician who risked death by putting himself on the front line of so many battles, fell victim to an accident that left him permanently disabled. Do not overlook this book. First, because it reads like an adventure novel—one in which the adventures are real. Second, because no one is more knowledgeable than Tissot about the Kurdish tragedy, a tragedy of which the battle of Mosul may conceivably represent the beginning of the end—or at least some of us hope so. And, third, because from its pages emerges the self-portrait of a man whose type rose from the mud of the twentieth century but is by no means sure to survive the katabasis, the descent toward the worst, of these early years of the twenty-first. Tissot is an adventurous physican; a healer of bodies who rejects the abasement souls; a man without borders whose concern for human rights exemplifies a certain idea of France, of the world, and of the human race—an idea not yet wholly extinct.
Translated by Steven B. Kennedy