EFL
Look. I know it is shooting French in a barrel. But when yet another insufferable penseur -- first Chirac, then de Villepin, now the editor of Le Monde -- starts lecturing Americans on how they ought to conduct themselves in the world, the rules of decorum are suspended. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Jean-Marie Colombani, who wrote the famous Sept. 12, 2001, Le Monde editorial titled "We Are All American," gives us the usual more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lament about America’s sins: We loved you on Sept. 11. We were all with you in Afghanistan. But, oh, what have you done in Iraq?
| Same thing, different place. Wanna see us do it again? |
This requires some parsing. We loved you on Sept. 11 means: We like Americans when they are victims, on their knees and bleeding. We just don’t like it when they get off the floor -- without checking with us first. Colombani glories in Europe’s post-Sept. 11 "solidarity" with America: "Let us remember here the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to . . . free the Afghans." Come again? The French arrived in Mazar-e Sharif after it fell, or as military analyst Jay Leno put it, "to serve as advisers to the Taliban on how to surrender properly." Afghanistan was liberated by America acting practically unilaterally, with an even smaller coalition than it had in Iraq -- Britain and Australia, with the rest of the world holding America’s coat.
"Zut, alors! The shooting is over! We can be brave again! Look at the great things we have accomplished!"
"Whaddya mean 'we,' Jean-Pierre?" |
But then came Iraq. "The problem was not so much the war itself, but the fact that it was launched without U.N. approval," Colombani explains.
| "Sacred blue! In la Belle France we do nothing without the UN's approval! Nothing, I tell you!" |
Rubbish. The Kosovo war was launched without U.N. approval and France joined it. Only two wars have ever been launched with U.N. approval: the Korean War (an accident of the Soviets having walked out of the Security Council on another matter) and the Persian Gulf War. It is touching to hear such legalistic objections to deposing a man who has killed more Muslims than any person on Earth -- particularly when the objection is offered from a pose of superior international morality from a country whose commandos once blew up a Greenpeace ship monitoring French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
| Actually, I don't really hold that against them... |
Moreover, Colombani complains, George Bush "lied about the weapons of mass destruction -- the official pretext for the war -- as now publicly established by recent investigations." More rubbish. The investigations have established that the weapons have not been found and may not exist. The claim that the president knew so at the time, and lied about it as a "pretext" for war, is a malicious falsehood.
| Continuously repeating the claim is inoculation against the same thing happening to Syria, Iran, and Sudan... |
It is not John Kerry’s fault that he is endorsed by a Frenchman. (Or by Kim Jong Il of North Korea, whose media have been running some of Kerry’s speeches verbatim!) But Kerry has made the major -- indeed, only discernible -- theme of his foreign policy "rejoining the community of nations" and being liked abroad again. Which is why he does not just court foreign support, he boasts about it. "I’ve met foreign leaders, who can’t go out and say this publicly," he told a Hollywood, Fla., fundraiser, "but boy they look at you and say, ’You gotta win this one, you gotta beat this guy.’" For the world. For France. |