By Nelson Ascher.....scary how the French don't have a clue.....
Having read today's (Sunday's) French papers and magazines there's no avoiding the conclusion that in terms of foreign policy they are living in a parallel universe — a universe that works rigorously according to their rules, or rather, to their wishes. They're sure they're right. But that's fine: there's nothing new about this. They're also sure the US is absolutely wrong, and this is also OK.
But they do not only think the UK's wrong: they believe that Blair and the English know they're wrong and are just waiting for America's first moment of distraction to tell the French how right they (the French) have been all along. The French are in no doubt that at the first possible opportunity the Brits will approach them to beg them their forgiveness for having done something so patently stupid as siding with the Yanks. The very improbable possibility that a military victory might enhance Blair's prestige chez les anglais doesn't obviously belong in their Cartesian universe. Neither does the idea that, even if they were wrong, the English could perhaps persist in the mistake of thinking they're right. No way: isn't it obvious that the English need the French in order to get rid of the Americans? In other words: according to the French the only result of the Anglo-American alliance has been to strengthen guess who: the French.
Someone (it could and it should have been but it wasn't Karl Kraus) said before WW1 that the root of all international troubles was that diplomats lied to journalists and then took what they read in the newspapers seriously. As the French papers haven't been seriously covering the war and as their journalists read only each other and so on, I'm afraid the whole of France will completely misunderstand the meaning of a huge victory. The French are so sure that their disapproval has fatally weakened les anglo-saxons that they do not even dream of the remote possibility that, in the international stage, they (les anglo-saxons) are stronger by the day.
They've got so used to speak in the name of the world that they don't seem to suspect that the Russians for sure and the Germans probably will try to mend fences with America as soon as possible. The French papers speak as if they were les porte-paroles first of all of Europe and then of the rest of the world. The idea that they might get or may already be isolated has not dawned upon them yet. You see: the world is actually the UN and the UN is actually ruled by the Security Council and in the Security Council they actually have 4 votes (because the English, you see, want nothing more than to sever their mésalliance avec les américains) out of 5 and actually that's it. They've won. The game is over. Can't you see that? Don't those anglo-saxons simplistes understand that there's no use in winning a war (but they're losing it anyway) if you lose the peace (which has already been lost even before the loss of the war)? And the silence of the American administration doesn't even sound ominous to them. |