Posted on 02/22/2005 6:20:20 PM PST by wagglebee
IRAQ war wobbler Jacques Chirac scuttled George Bush’s fence-mending trip to Europe yesterday — by cranking up a row over the future of Nato.
He embraced a German-led plot to ditch the alliance as the backbone of transatlantic relations, in favour of the European Union.
He also snubbed President Bush by speaking French at a dinner, despite having fluent English.
(Excerpt) Read more at thesun.co.uk ...
Then the beloved Chirac will face sentencing as did others involved in the Total"ly" Elf Fina probe have from both the company and the political party of Chirac"y" was the paymaster:) Ah, frog legs may soon again grace the menu!
I was thinking along those lines myself. W seems to have that Cheshire Cat look on his face! I think at this point the opposition is damned if they do and damned if they don't. W wins either way.
I'm wondering how this is a snub at all. Its his language, am I missing something?
LOL !
I like that idea.
I guess that means turning it all over to Blair, since none of the rest have an effective military capable of doing much of anything. What a joke.
Who would want to hear the frogs thoughts anyway. He is just running a anyone but Bush campaign in France. Pretty sad.
An amazing post, your #55. Gracefully well said!
Welcome to FR. Thank you for your participation.
I'm so thrilled to be wrong! Whatever the timing or the original reasons for it, the President has used this trip to redefine -- yet again -- the debate. He's a master at setting the vocabulary, and, thus, setting the terms of the worldwide struggle. Truly, it's marvelous to watch. On one side we've got Al Queda denouncing "democracy" and "freedom" while Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saud Arabia (!) hold elections! On the other side, he's pushed Russia up against a wall of Ukraine and the European Union. While I'm not sure where China sits in all this, China's silence is rather large, especially as things play out in Korea.
No mistakes to be made in this game.
"He embraced a German-led plot to ditch the alliance"...?
Sounds good to me, get our bases out of there, NATO membership in name only. All yours, EU! NATO was fine for 2 generations, but now 10 years since needed.
Lets let Brussels "plot to ditch" us, PLEASE!
Remember last year's much trumpeted Nato summit in Turkey? This was the one at which everyone was excited at how the "alliance" had agreed to expand its role in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to the country's somewhat overly autonomous "autonomous regions".What this turned out to mean on closer examination was that, after the secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, put the squeeze on Nato's 26 members, they reluctantly put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country - Turkey - and they've already gone back. And Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war, the one Continental officials all claim to have supported, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their "principled moral opposition" to Iraq.
Then why do we continue to pretend that the non-US/UK NATO will someday, somewhere, somehow provide military forces to do you know -- military stuff? The French couldn't even get their troops to Bosnia/Kosovo when needed. They had to commandeer several tourist ferries off the Sardinia/Corsica run.
This is like when your kid gets mad and trys to snub you. Meaningless.
Now that is a very interesting observation..
Dear Judith Anne,
Thank you.
It hurts a little to see my "trans-alpine" cousins called frogs. Anyway, "roosters" would be more appropriate.
One of the great ironies - though understandable of course - is that Americans have stopped drinking wines to punish the French. The poor winemakers are among the most conservative elements of that country, the least happy to see Islam encroach. Wine is forbidden by Islam!
The best policy of course is to prefer and cultivate your own very good American wines. But punishing French wines is ideologically counterproductive as well as an assault on civilization itself. Even if America were governed by a man with a moustache waving his arms from a balcony to goose-setpping throngs, I would still love pancakes, brownies, cheese cake.
I believe it is wrong to punish civilization over matters of politics. However, to hell with French wines, because I have my own Italian wines to defend. I just recently discovered that here in our south we have a Zinfandel called "Primitivo"... genetically almost identical to the famous California wines (which are now being sold in Italy!
Salute!
Remember, though: In America, it is considered low-class to call the French "frogs".
Here in America, it is much more proper to call them "cheese-eating surrender monkeys".
NINO's?
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