The French reaction

Title: The French reaction

Some of the US media have been recently accused the French of being "ungrateful" when refusing to support US warmongering. Here is the a French response, presented with typical French wit.

E. Prugovecki

 

> Merci For the French
> Correction
> By Justin Vaisse
> Saturday, February 15, 2003; Page A33
>
> As a Frenchman, I have certainly learned a lot about my country in
> recent weeks.
>
> "How dare the French forget," read a headline in the New
> York Post on Monday, on a page with a photograph of a military
> cemetery in Normandy.
>
> 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?
>
> I now know what really happened: Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that a
> country with more than 300 kinds of cheese was worth liberating, and
> for the love of France he came to our rescue. Joseph Stalin came to
> the same conclusion, but -- fortunately for us -- he was slower and
> had to stop in Berlin.
>
> Meanwhile, Lafayette and Rochambeau were a different story altogether:
> They apparently came here not to help Americans gain their
> independence but merely to execute the crass realpolitik maneuvers of
> Louis XVI.
>
> I have also been interested to learn that my hesitation in endorsing
> war in Iraq is mainly a product of my nostalgia for France's past
> glory. As Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times, being weak
> after being powerful is a terrible thing. Perhaps he is right. I had
> been deluded into thinking that my doubts about military intervention
> in Iraq had something to do with fears of civilian casualties, the use
> of weapons of mass destruction, increasing terrorism or Middle East
> instability. But apparently we French are really just longing for the
> time of Napoleon or Louis XIV.
>
> In those good old days, we could unilaterally invade a Muslim Arab
> country, say Egypt or Algeria, and create a regional mess just because
> we felt like it. Now, because we can't do that anymore, we try to
> bother the United States. The fact that war is opposed by large
> majorities in most other countries around the world, which have no
> such nostalgia complexes, must be pure coincidence.
>
> 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 U.N. 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.
>
> Now that I have admitted everything, I should own up to
> the true motivation of our foreign policy: We are protecting
> commercial interests, especially oil. For the harsh truth, just check
> out the International Monetary Fund's Web site:
>
> From 2000 to 2001, our exports to Iraq jumped from 0.12 percent to 0.2
> percent of our total exports! Never mind that we'll never realize our
> oil contracts with Iraq or get our debt repaid so long as Saddam
> Hussein stays in power, and don't believe anyone who tells you that a
> truly mercantilist France would help America attack Iraq and share the
> spoils afterward. Some even make the bizarre claim that if America
> wanted to enhance its oil interests, it would join France and oppose
> the war in the United Nations so as to keep oil flowing from Iraq at
> current levels (America is the first buyer of Iraqi oil). But not too
> much oil, as this would lower the price to a point where it would be
> bad for Texas producers and Alaska drilling. But I take that as
> typically far-fetched Gallic perfidy.
> 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, especially when you look
> at Afghanistan.
>
> But I don't listen to them anymore. After all, they're French. I know
> better. I have become an American.
>
> Justin Vaisse is a visiting fellow at the Center on the U.S. and
> France at the Brookings Institution.
> © 2003 The Washington Post
> Company