The French Spin a Different War Story

Insight on the News ^ | unknown [recently] | Kenneth R. Timmerman

[walford]

... The average Frenchman listening to state-run France Inter radio or Antenne 2 television during the first week of the war in Iraq saw the United States spiraling toward a humiliating defeat, and Bush, the "cowboy" president, headed for ignominy if not impeachment. In tones that mixed elation and awe, newsmen and pundits began speculating on how the Middle East would look the day after the United States lost the war against Saddam. Wouldn't this dramatic display of U.S. vulnerability encourage other nations and terrorist groups to challenge overrated U.S. military might?...

[walford]

This is another take on the French media bias that was discussed in an article that I wrote for AIM [that was posted in an earlier thread]. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/920298/posts

Please see that thread for AIM readers comments, especially from Thomas Bertran. Apparently he feels that France is the victim and that we have all been terribly unfair.

[SwinneySwitch]

Les Batards!

[walford]

link didn't work, I'll try again:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/920298/posts

[brbethke]

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, novelist le Carré said, "Any mailman who sees a book on Islam at your house can denounce you as someone potentially dangerous. It's hallucinatory! Nothing has changed since 1952."

Au contraire, one very important thing has changed. We now know that Senator Joseph McCarthy was right in 1952, that the U.S. State Department was riddled with communist agents, and that the KGB was supplying financing and direction to "local" communist parties all over America and western Europe.

[xkaydet65]

Anyone who wants a lesson in domestic repression need only view France's domestic security forces and their powers. Ten Patriot Acts could never equal the powers of the Garde Mobile and the Deuxieme Bureau. Nowhere in America do visitors to towns or cities have to register with the local police.(itself a misnomer as the police in France are national). What tourist to America must surrender his passport to the hotel to be checked and held by the police?
As Tom Clancy said in one of his later novels, giving American law enforce ment the powers of those of France, or Germany for that matter, would reult in a second American Revolution.

[DeuceTraveler]

I've been in Paris and never had to surrender my passport, nor check in with local police.

[m1911]

Me either.

[nutmeg]

Nowhere in America do visitors to towns or cities have to register with the local police.(itself a misnomer as the police in France are national). What tourist to America must surrender his passport to the hotel to be checked and held by the police?

???

I've been to France many times, and never heard of such a thing.

[Sparta]

The French national media is no better than Pravada and the People's Daily, which some Saddam sycophants also consider reliable sources.

[BartMan1]

Frogs....

[chudogg]

during the first week of the war in Iraq saw the United States spiraling toward a humiliating defeat, and Bush, the "cowboy" president, headed for ignominy if not impeachment

Hey, its just like American Media!

[Billthedrill]

The French government does not understand Bush, and the French people do not understand what happened in America after 9/11. The former confusion is one caused by a somewhat myopic preference for the Clinton administration's internationalist sympathies and a sadly overinflated estimation of its own position with respect to Europe and the world. This is understandable - the leverage it has employed with respect to the EU gives it the idea that the very same lever can move the world. In fact, the EU seems to be pushing back. I'm not sure the French government appreciates that either.

But the real misconception, media-fed as the author describes, is that this is Vietnam all over again and that they may ally with "enlightened" opinion within the U.S. to force the U.S. government to capitulate in matters of foreign policy. 9/11 is the difference. The French people have an entirely insufficient appreciation of the galvanizing effect losing 3000+ innocent people in an unprovoked (they would debate even this) attack one lovely morning in September 2001. Most do not remember a similar national epiphany in December 1941, and why should they? The swastika was flying over Paris at the time. But it does strike me that a sort of national epiphany has taken place even on the ideological left in the United States, and that has certainly not registered in "old" Europe.

In fact, many of the people we are speaking about here are so far from friends that they truly feel (1) that the United States deserved to be attacked, and (2) that it should simply accept 3000 deaths in its soil and (3) in addition, apologize to their killers for offending them. It used to be that "enlightened" people in the United States would either agree with them or attempt the impossible task of talking them out of it. What has changed is that the hatred that used to be a harmless, even useful, political pose in French popular opinion is being returned coin for coin, insult for insult. Personally I think it is a welcome and necessary corrective.