Posted on 02/24/2005 8:15:52 PM PST by Alex Marko
As a young boy during and after World War I, I read everything I could find about the romantically named Lafayette Escadrille, the young Americans who became fighter pilots to help France in her war against Wilhelmine Germany. But living and thinking through the 20th and into the 21st century, I find myself torn between my boyish love for France and its culture and my despair over what France has become.
It was Chirac who made Saddam Hussein the power he became in the Middle East. It was the French nuclear weapons establishment that had almost finished building a nuclear facility at Osirak, known derisively as O'Chirac, near Baghdad, when in 1981 Israel bombed it to rubble. Chirac built Osirak for Saddam even though in a 1975 interview Saddam had admitted: "The agreement with France is the first concrete step toward the production of the Arab atomic weapon."
By 1983, Iraq was purchasing 51.5% of all French arms exports. In the U.N. Security Council, France became Saddam's defender. Chirac's unbreakable friendship with Saddam propped up a regime concerning whose accomplishments the Washington Post observed (July 7, 2003): "An estimated 290,000 people are missing and believed to be buried in mass graves throughout Iraq. In a country of 22 million, that is more than 1 percent of the population, the equivalent of about 3.5 million people in the United States. The vast majority of these bodies have not been found."
Even in the days of the socialist François Mitterand, he argues, France looked upon the U.S. as a dangerous rival. That fear of the U.S. increased when the Soviet Union fell: no more need for American protection against the Bolsheviks. In 1991, L'Express revealed that between 1987 and 1989 French intelligence had planted moles in the French offices of IBM, Texas Instruments, and Corning Glass to steal economic and industrial secrets on behalf of French state-owned enterprises. An NBC documentary discovered that French airlines regularly planted microphones in the seats of their first-class compartment, to record conversations of U.S. businessmen.
The U.S. is now reacting to French enmity with some harshness. For example, the French military attaché in Washington was informed that France would not be getting its usual slots at the March 2004 Red Flag exercise, NATO's premier live flying war game. And President Bush personally vetoed a request from the French chief of staff to visit CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Nonetheless, U.S. nuclear laboratories are still helping the French, the U.S. is still subsidizing the French nuclear weapons establishment, and, most unbelievable of all, the Bush Administration is offering Chirac the secrets of the U.S. national missile defense.
In France today, anti-semitism, both right-wing and left-wing, runs deep. Today the Paris Metro is no longer safe for Jews or those whom the Muslim gangs think are Jews. The Muslim population in France itself approaches 10% and is growing more influential each day. A recently published book, La Republique des laches (The Republic of Cowards), mocks the French regime for its retreat before its Muslim inhabitants' anti-democratic behavior. For instance, instead of walking out of the stadium when the Marseillaise was booed at a French-Algerian soccer match, then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stayed on. And though the increasingly influential Muslim presence suffered a setback when the government forbade Muslim girls to wear their veils in school, separatist Muslims continue to demand that school gymnasiums and swimming pools be segregated.
One of the great errors in the aftermath of World War II was to have enshrined France among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, leaving no room for democracies of far greater importance to the world today. If the president of France now regards America as an enemy country and French diplomacy is directed against the United States it is time to think hard about what should be done.
Oh, and about those Americans who gave their lives fighting for French liberties, Timmerman tells this story: When Charles De Gaulle pulled France out of the NATO unified military command and ordered the United States to depart from bases in the Paris suburb of Saint-German-en-Laye, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly asked him if he also wanted us to take the graveyards full of our dead at Omaha Beach. Three belated cheers for LBJ.
The france of ChIRAQ and the France of Petain are the same.
French opposition to the United States has never really had any particular consequences and so has grown into a truly cult-like obsession. During the Cold War we could not afford to break up Western solidarity when faced with an aggressive Soviet Union and the French could get away with things like undermining NATO and blaming the United States for prosecuting a war France had started (and lost) in Vietnam, and so we were silent in the face of ever more outrageous insults. The end of the Cold War changed not a great deal, really, from the French perspective, except that the ground they occupied was no longer middle, one pole of its configuration having evaporated.
Now Chirac is attempting to pursue his geopolitical ambitions by nothing less than a takeover of the nascent EU, and forming alliances with countries such as China whose own national objectives are of little interest to France except insofar as they constitute enmity to the United States.
This is not the act of a friend in any sense. This is the consistent track record of an implacable enemy. I do not consider myself an alarmist, and would like to imagine that it is the private obsession of a zealot on the wrong side of history. That may not, in fact, be the case, and if not, then we have to consider reformulating U.S. foriegn policy under the premise that France is an openly hostile nation on the order of Iran, and that they intend to influence the entire EU on that account if they are able.
We are always told by the left that Rumsfeld sold all the aems to Saddam.
arms to Saddam that is
Bill, this is a superb analysis. For further insight into this issue from a slightly broader aspect, I might suggest a close read of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" that will be out in April.
Ye'or takes on the issue from an historical perspective -- and examines it from its infancy in the 30's. Great analysis of the coming demise of Europe.
Kindest regards -- and a great weekend to all.
the c.i.a. weather forecast for france the next decade:
some social uprisings.
oui, oui.
We were living in Paris then and I was attending a local French school (BTW, my brother and I placed 1st and 2nd in our respective grades).
Loved living in Paris and would like to go back, if it weren't for all those damned Parisians!
It's not unlike living in Boston. LOL!
Not true. Petain didn't pretend to be our ally or have a seat in the Big Three.
But they were socialist, anti-semitic and generally wussies.
Somehow we Americans have got to learn not to bend over every time some foreigner feels offended.
France sickens me to my stomach.
Good for LBJ.
BTTT
Well written analysis. My question is: How should
we treat France? You mentioned treating them as an
enemy. How do we do this? Trade barriers perhaps?
If so, then lets start with Airbus!
Economical strategy would be the best way to combat france. or....throw a bar of soap at them.
(Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News.")
"Nonetheless, U.S. nuclear laboratories are still helping the French, the U.S. is still subsidizing the French nuclear weapons establishment, and, most unbelievable of all, the Bush Administration is offering Chirac the secrets of the U.S. national missile defense."
Someone P L E A S E tell me this isn't true.
Boycott France!
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