French connection

It is difficult to comment on the Iraq war without losing my temper. One of the early and striking pieces of insanity, though, was the demonization of France by the Bush administration.

Here is some discusison, taken from a 18 February 2003 Chicago tribune editorial by Justin Vaisse (visiting fellow at the Center on the U.S. and France at the Brookings Institution) called "Dissecting the French connection to war"

"How dare the French forget..." I apologize for being so ungrateful. It's just that I learned in school that France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, while the United States was enacting isolationist laws, and that America entered the war two years later, only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. But now I see that was just Gallic propaganda. How could I have believed it?

Another thing I had failed to appreciate was how isolated we French are. It's painful to admit, but only 73 percent of the French people oppose a war without a second UN resolution. We definitely cannot pretend we speak for the rest of the world, as war is opposed by 82 percent of the European Union (84 percent of Brits), and in other parts of the world, let's say South America, it's more in the range of 90 percent. So we should shut up. And we should also admit that our isolation makes us insignificant, though I still can't understand why publications such as the Weekly Standard keep talking about us so much. Maybe it has something to do with our food.

My situation is now very difficult: When I talk to my former French friends on the phone, they claim they oppose the war for the same reasons about 40 percent of Americans do. They claim that they find their own arguments expounded in American newspapers by American statesmen; namely, that war would help Osama bin Laden recruit new followers; that war would trigger more terrorist attacks at home and abroad; that containment can work; and that it would be hard to impose stability -- let alone democracy -- on Iraq.