Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
Mike Ellis
TDR MEMBER
Good article from Canadian source showing how the French bluster against America attacking Iraq has a bit more to it than most folks think. Long, but definitely worth reading.
Also points out the growing power of France and Germany in the EU. Since France is one of the most resolute opponents of the USA in geopolitics, will we someday face a united French-Germany superpower with the same tensions we once faced Russia? It would be very ironic if Russia ended up one of our principle allies in such a face-off...
************
Mark Steyn --National Post Canada
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Let's say you're the head of government of a middle-rank power. You have
no feelings one way or the other on the morality of things, that being a
simplistic Texan cowboy concept. What then should your line on Iraq be?
The first question to ask yourself is: Is Bush serious about war? If
your answer is yes, the next question is: Will he win that war?
Answer: Yes, and very quickly. You know that, even if the drooling
quagmire predictors of the press don't. So the next question is: How
will the Iraqi people feel about it?
Answer: They'll be dancing in the streets. You know that, even if Susan
Sarandon and Ed Asner don't. They don't know because, although the
"peace" movement claims to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the
Iraqi people, no Iraqi person wants to put his shoulder anywhere near
them. They know the scale of Saddam's murder and torture. And once the
vaults are unpadlocked so will the rest of the world. So the obvious
question is: If, for the cost of chipping in a couple of fighter jets,
you can pass yourself off as an heroic co-liberator of a monstrous
tyranny and position yourself for a big piece of the economic action
from the new regime, why not go for it? It would appear to be, in the
ghastly vernacular of the cretinous Yanks, a "no-brainer. "
Ah, but for those with a big sophisticated Continental brain it's all
more complicated than that. There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in
the world, several of them francophone (hint), but Jacques Chirac is not
among them. Say what you like about M. le President -- call him
irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt,
and almost absurdly conceited. But he's not stupid. The issue for the
French is very straightforward: What's in it for us?
The answer to that may vary, but frame the question as a negative and
the reply is always the same: What's not in it for France is that
America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced.
France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and right now
the main obstacle to that is the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical
settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone's
sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America's Rome, or Tonto
to Bush's Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya's Little Orphan Annie,
fine. The French aren't interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor.
This isn't quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers. As
far as I can see, American pop culture only ever has room for one joke
about the French. For three decades, the Single French Joke was that
they were the guys who thought Jerry Lewis was a genius. I don't
particularly see the harm in that myself, at least when compared to
thinking, say, Jean-Paul Sartre is a genius. But, since September 11th,
the new Single French Joke has been that they're "cheese-eating
surrender monkeys," a phrase introduced on The Simpsons but greatly
popularized by Jonah Goldberg of National Review. Jonah, you'll recall,
recently flayed us Canadians for being a bunch of northern pussies, but
it's a measure of the contempt in which he holds our D-list Dominion
that we didn't even merit a pithy four-word sneer-in-a-can.
The trouble is the cheese-eating surrender paradigm is insufficient. If
you want to go monkey fishing, there's certainly no shortage of
Eurowimps: Since the unpleasantness of 60 years ago, the Germans have
become as aggressively and obnoxiously pacifist as they once were
militarist; they loathe their own armed forces, never mind anybody
else's. But France is one of only five official nuclear powers in the
world, a status it takes seriously. When Greenpeace were interfering
with French nuclear tests in the Pacific, they blew up the damn boat.
Even I, a right-wing detester of the eco-loonies, would balk at killing
the buggers.
A few weeks ago, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. Don't ask me
what's going on: President Wossname represents the southern
Wotchamacallit tribe and they're unpopular with natives in the northern
province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know,
French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties
into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d'Orsay but
nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long
debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7. 3 (d) of Hans
Blix's hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The
French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have
to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don't care what you
think about it.
So they're not appeasing Saddam. On the matter of Islamic terrorists
killing American office workers and American forces killing Iraqi
psychopaths, they are equally insouciant. Let's say Saddam has
long-range WMDs. If he nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would
insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution
before responding. If he nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq would be a
crater by lunchtime.
It's true that for a couple of centuries the French have not performed
impressively on the battlefield per se. But even a surrender monkey can
wind up king of the swingers. In the Second World War, half of France
was occupied, the rest was run by a collaborationist regime; there were
a couple of dozen in the French Resistance listening to the BBC under
the bed, and a gazillion on the other side, enthusiastically shipping
Jews east. And yet, miracle of miracles, in the post-war order France
wound up with one of only five UN Security Council vetoes. Canada did
far more heavy lifting and was far more deserving of a seat at the top
table. But the point is, despite being deeply compromised and tainted,
the French came out a big winner.
Their next ingenious wheeze was to co-opt the new Germany, a country
with formidable economic muscle but paralyzed by self-doubt. Overlooked
in last week's fuss about Schroeder and Chirac's thumbs-down to Bush was
the real meat of their confab: the proposal to create a merged
Franco-German citizenship. There's already a "European" citizenship,
largely meaningless at the moment but intended (or so it was assumed) to
be a legal identity that would eventually supersede national
citizenship. Now Schroeder and Chirac have effectively announced that at
the heart of the European Union will be a Franco-German superstate of
140 million people around which the Dutch and Austrians and other minor
satellites cluster like the princely states around British India.
Even the ostensibly risible constitutional proposal that there should be
two Presidents of Europe has a kind of sense: one will be, as a general
rule, French or, if necessary, German; the other will be some nonentity
from Luxembourg or Denmark. Whatever you think of all this, it's not the
behaviour of surrender monkeys. A year ago, David Warren dismissed
Canada and other fence-sitters as "spectators in their own fates. "
That's not the French. The startling suggestion that the French
government will fund and run state mosques, in order to obstruct the
malign spread of Saudi Wahhabism, may sound kooky to American ears. But
to sly French Machiavels, it has the potential of neutering the
potential Muslim threat as thoroughly as they permanently neutered the
German threat.
Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a
useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish
Prime Minister, declared that "the EU must not develop into a military
superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at
any occasion in order to defend its own interests. " This sounds insane.
But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can't beat the Americans
on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and
other supranational bodies.
In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the
sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose.
Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a
temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French
machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But
through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It
reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle
Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France
and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of
Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively
effectively. It's time the rest of the West was so clear-sighted.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
Also points out the growing power of France and Germany in the EU. Since France is one of the most resolute opponents of the USA in geopolitics, will we someday face a united French-Germany superpower with the same tensions we once faced Russia? It would be very ironic if Russia ended up one of our principle allies in such a face-off...
************
Mark Steyn --National Post Canada
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Let's say you're the head of government of a middle-rank power. You have
no feelings one way or the other on the morality of things, that being a
simplistic Texan cowboy concept. What then should your line on Iraq be?
The first question to ask yourself is: Is Bush serious about war? If
your answer is yes, the next question is: Will he win that war?
Answer: Yes, and very quickly. You know that, even if the drooling
quagmire predictors of the press don't. So the next question is: How
will the Iraqi people feel about it?
Answer: They'll be dancing in the streets. You know that, even if Susan
Sarandon and Ed Asner don't. They don't know because, although the
"peace" movement claims to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the
Iraqi people, no Iraqi person wants to put his shoulder anywhere near
them. They know the scale of Saddam's murder and torture. And once the
vaults are unpadlocked so will the rest of the world. So the obvious
question is: If, for the cost of chipping in a couple of fighter jets,
you can pass yourself off as an heroic co-liberator of a monstrous
tyranny and position yourself for a big piece of the economic action
from the new regime, why not go for it? It would appear to be, in the
ghastly vernacular of the cretinous Yanks, a "no-brainer. "
Ah, but for those with a big sophisticated Continental brain it's all
more complicated than that. There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in
the world, several of them francophone (hint), but Jacques Chirac is not
among them. Say what you like about M. le President -- call him
irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt,
and almost absurdly conceited. But he's not stupid. The issue for the
French is very straightforward: What's in it for us?
The answer to that may vary, but frame the question as a negative and
the reply is always the same: What's not in it for France is that
America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced.
France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and right now
the main obstacle to that is the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical
settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone's
sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America's Rome, or Tonto
to Bush's Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya's Little Orphan Annie,
fine. The French aren't interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor.
This isn't quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers. As
far as I can see, American pop culture only ever has room for one joke
about the French. For three decades, the Single French Joke was that
they were the guys who thought Jerry Lewis was a genius. I don't
particularly see the harm in that myself, at least when compared to
thinking, say, Jean-Paul Sartre is a genius. But, since September 11th,
the new Single French Joke has been that they're "cheese-eating
surrender monkeys," a phrase introduced on The Simpsons but greatly
popularized by Jonah Goldberg of National Review. Jonah, you'll recall,
recently flayed us Canadians for being a bunch of northern pussies, but
it's a measure of the contempt in which he holds our D-list Dominion
that we didn't even merit a pithy four-word sneer-in-a-can.
The trouble is the cheese-eating surrender paradigm is insufficient. If
you want to go monkey fishing, there's certainly no shortage of
Eurowimps: Since the unpleasantness of 60 years ago, the Germans have
become as aggressively and obnoxiously pacifist as they once were
militarist; they loathe their own armed forces, never mind anybody
else's. But France is one of only five official nuclear powers in the
world, a status it takes seriously. When Greenpeace were interfering
with French nuclear tests in the Pacific, they blew up the damn boat.
Even I, a right-wing detester of the eco-loonies, would balk at killing
the buggers.
A few weeks ago, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. Don't ask me
what's going on: President Wossname represents the southern
Wotchamacallit tribe and they're unpopular with natives in the northern
province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know,
French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties
into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d'Orsay but
nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long
debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7. 3 (d) of Hans
Blix's hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The
French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have
to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don't care what you
think about it.
So they're not appeasing Saddam. On the matter of Islamic terrorists
killing American office workers and American forces killing Iraqi
psychopaths, they are equally insouciant. Let's say Saddam has
long-range WMDs. If he nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would
insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution
before responding. If he nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq would be a
crater by lunchtime.
It's true that for a couple of centuries the French have not performed
impressively on the battlefield per se. But even a surrender monkey can
wind up king of the swingers. In the Second World War, half of France
was occupied, the rest was run by a collaborationist regime; there were
a couple of dozen in the French Resistance listening to the BBC under
the bed, and a gazillion on the other side, enthusiastically shipping
Jews east. And yet, miracle of miracles, in the post-war order France
wound up with one of only five UN Security Council vetoes. Canada did
far more heavy lifting and was far more deserving of a seat at the top
table. But the point is, despite being deeply compromised and tainted,
the French came out a big winner.
Their next ingenious wheeze was to co-opt the new Germany, a country
with formidable economic muscle but paralyzed by self-doubt. Overlooked
in last week's fuss about Schroeder and Chirac's thumbs-down to Bush was
the real meat of their confab: the proposal to create a merged
Franco-German citizenship. There's already a "European" citizenship,
largely meaningless at the moment but intended (or so it was assumed) to
be a legal identity that would eventually supersede national
citizenship. Now Schroeder and Chirac have effectively announced that at
the heart of the European Union will be a Franco-German superstate of
140 million people around which the Dutch and Austrians and other minor
satellites cluster like the princely states around British India.
Even the ostensibly risible constitutional proposal that there should be
two Presidents of Europe has a kind of sense: one will be, as a general
rule, French or, if necessary, German; the other will be some nonentity
from Luxembourg or Denmark. Whatever you think of all this, it's not the
behaviour of surrender monkeys. A year ago, David Warren dismissed
Canada and other fence-sitters as "spectators in their own fates. "
That's not the French. The startling suggestion that the French
government will fund and run state mosques, in order to obstruct the
malign spread of Saudi Wahhabism, may sound kooky to American ears. But
to sly French Machiavels, it has the potential of neutering the
potential Muslim threat as thoroughly as they permanently neutered the
German threat.
Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a
useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish
Prime Minister, declared that "the EU must not develop into a military
superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at
any occasion in order to defend its own interests. " This sounds insane.
But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can't beat the Americans
on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and
other supranational bodies.
In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the
sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose.
Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a
temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French
machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But
through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It
reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle
Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France
and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of
Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively
effectively. It's time the rest of the West was so clear-sighted.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
