The Hypocrisy of Jacques Chirac

Good thing President George W. Bush didn't stick around to listen to French President Jacques Chirac's speech at the United Nations on Sept. 23, even though it came right on the heels of his own call for greater international cooperation in the fight against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He might have had second thoughts about meeting Chirac later.

"No one can act alone in the name of all," Chirac intoned, "and no one can accept the anarchy of a lawless society. There is no alternative to the United Nations." French diplomats were quick to point out to reporters that Chirac had aimed his remarks squarely at Bush, and that the "lawless society" was the United States. "Chirac Defends the U.N. Against Bush," ran the headline in the gray lady of French journalism, Le Monde. "The United States [was] placed in the box of the accused," the story said on page 2. Here readers learned about Bush, "the man who started a war without the U.N.," who had the nerve to appear in the same time slot as "three advocates of multilateralism," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Chirac. Cheeky, indeed.

Guided by Chirac's spin doctors, the French press pointed out that Chirac had nothing against the American people, just a bone to pick with their man Bush. In phrasing that echoed U.S. policy toward Iran, a founding member of the Axis of Evil, Le Monde wrote that Chirac "has taken care constantly to make the distinction between the policy carried out by George Bush and his administration and the American people, friends for 225 years toward whom he made many gestures of closeness and affection." The conservative daily Le Figaro chewed on the same bone, quoting a source close to Chirac who said the French president considered Bush and his administration "the most reactionary administration" he had ever seen.

There was comic relief in the wretched reporting, such as this gem from a backgrounder in Le Figaro: "Not long after the election of Bush the father, Jacques Chirac was the first French leader to meet him even before [French president François] Mitterrand during a trip to the United States in May 1989. A trip during which the former French prime minister [Chirac], who had just been beaten in the presidential election, met everyone who counted for anything in American society at the time: from the president of Disney, Michael Eisner, to film stars Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, Farrah Fawcett and Sidney Poitier." That's it, no omissions — right down to the sentence fragment. The French, who pride themselves on their sophisticated worldview, still have a hard time seeing beyond Hollywood and Disneyland.

Chirac also called for an immediate transfer of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, a ploy dismissed as "unreasonable" by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush, who argued that the United States had no intention of leaving the Iraqis in the lurch before they could build lasting representative institutions. Seeing as the French had rejected the creation of the interim Iraqi government in the first place, there no doubt will be those who find this a curious twist coming from the president of a nation that prides itself on logic and consistency.

For neoconservative politician Alain Madelin, a former minister in Chirac governments who opposed him in the first round of last year's presidential elections, "French diplomacy today continues to consider Iraq as a cake to be divided and not as a democracy to be constructed. One of the demands of France is that there be an authority over Iraq's economy that is not under American control to handle contracts." In other words, with the United Nations in and the United States out, the French hoped to win reconstruction contracts.

But beyond all this, the persistent claim made by the French that war is only justified with U.N. approval is belied by their own actions. When French leaders, including Chirac, have felt their own interests at stake, they have not hesitated a heartbeat to send in the troops, whether it be to the Ivory Coast, Chad, Republic of the Congo or Kosovo.

Often, the definition of French interests had nothing to do with the security of France or the safety of French citizens, and even less with a French "vision" of a more moral world order. As a spate of corruption scandals that rocked the French political establishment during the last eight years has shown, more often than not the interests the politicians seek to defend are the Swiss bank accounts and slush funds they control in their own names or on behalf of their political parties.

Quote:

When pro-French governments in Gabon or the Ivory Coast are threatened with democracy, or by their neighbors, or by new leaders who refuse to pay up after the old ones die, the French have never hesitated to send in troops, without even a word to anyone, let alone the United Nations.

But ze Frawnsh zay are tres special, n'est pas?

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The article is well worth the time to read and re-read in full.

quoting:

... When French leaders, including Chirac, have felt their own interests at stake, they have not hesitated a heartbeat to send in the troops, whether it be to the Ivory Coast, Chad, Republic of the Congo or Kosovo.

...One example... involved French government support for a coup d'état in the Republic of the Congo that successfully restored to power former military strongman Gen. Denis Sassou-Nguesso. With French help, Sassou-Nguesso succeeded in tossing out democratically elected president Pascal Lissouba and murdering thousands of his fellow countrymen in the process. Why did the French conspire with the dictator of the Congo? "They said it was an unfriendly act" to offer oil-drilling contracts to Exxon instead of to the French national oil company Elf Aquitaine, Lissouba told the Washington Times.

Loik Le Floch-Pringent, a former president of Elf who was indicted and served time in one of the many corruption scandals in France in the late 1990s, explained in a memoir how Elf controlled Sassou-Nguesso despite his flirtation with the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War. Congo "for a time became Marxist, but was always under Elf control," he wrote.

...

The article goes on from there, and gets worse as it goes along.... marron

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