At the time, this brutal and intractable conflict seemed like a French affair. But from the perspective of half a century, it looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one: a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that now ravages the Middle East--struggles in which religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism assume previously unimagined degrees of intensity.