IF ever a film could be said to have changed the world, it is Gillo Pontecorvo's classic fictionalised account of the campaign of terror launched in 1954 against French colonial rule in Algeria by the National Liberation Front or FLN, referred to in the film as "the organisation". The brutal tactics of torture, intimidation and murder by which the French paratroopers under General Massu . . . represented in the film as Colonel Mathieu . . .

sought to repress the FLN provoked a national uprising that led to eventual independence in 1962.

Based on a memoir of one of the FLN commanders Saadi Yacef - with the backing by the new Algerian government in which he was a minister, and filmed on actual locations in 1965, The Battle of Algiers, banned initially in France and denounced by former paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, provided a blueprint for urban guerrilla warfare not just for revolutionary organisations such as the Provisional IRA and the Palestine Liberation Front but also for the counterinsurgency forces ranged against them. In 2003, soon after President Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech proclaiming the end of "major hostilities" in Iraq, it was even screened by special operations chiefs in the Pentagon to illustrate the danger of winning "a battle against terrorism but losing the war of ideas".

Its greatness as a film, providing inspiration to Costa-Gavras and Francesco Rosi in the '70s, and more recently Michael Winterbottom, is its immediacy and its truth.

Although not using any newsreel footage, its grainy, black-and-white hand-held camera work, together with the use on non-actors make it seem as if we're caught up in what is happening. Pontecorvo and his co-writer Franco Solonas achieve the rare feat of neither demonising the terrorists nor their oppressors. While it is clear from the circumstances that gave rise to the film that they sympathise with the Algerians, the film itself is neutral in its depiction of the atrocities committed by either side.

The Battle of Algiers . . . which I reviewed on its first Irish screening in 1971 . . . is now fully restored on a new 35mm print, with cuts in the torture scenes restored. It opens with a scene in which the paras viciously torture an old man to find the hideout of the terrorist leader Ali La Pointe. As the paras close in on the hideout, the film retraces the emergence of the liberation struggle and the escalating cycle of bombings and murders, matched the by torture and summary execution it spawned.

Colonel Mathieu . . . portrayed by Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the cast . . . is as much a victim of colonialism as the Algerians.

He even accepts that the Algerians are historically destined to win: his job is to put off the inevitable as long as possible. "If what you want is for France to remain in Algeria, " he tells hostile French reporters, "you must accept all the necessary consequences." The US and the UK face the same moral dilemma in Iraq, the euphemistic "necessary consequences" involving . . . as in Algeria . . . the slaughter and torture of innocent civilians that leads to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It would seem that while the Pentagon may have learned the lesson of The Battle of Algiers . . . that occupation forces can't ultimately crush popular insurgency . . . Bush and Blair are still in denial. Perhaps a screening of The Battle of Algiers is overdue at the White House.