You would be too if you'd never won one
Posted on 02/14/2003 11:18:21 PM PST by hotpotato
Edited on 02/14/2003 11:25:34 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
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?
The poor idiot doesn't even know that the anti-war sentiment was exactly the same......right before France was defeated and turned into collaborators.
Opinion polls show almost 80% of people in France are against a US-led war against Iraq. Many of those see American military and economic aims in Iraq as one and the same thing. America's critics claim that America's policy on Iraq is driven by its appetite for oil. But could similar claims be made about France?
Power games
During the late 1970s, French companies started work on the Tamuz One nuclear reactor near Baghdad - designed to produce plutonium - and on a second reactor, Tamuz Two.
The first was destroyed by Israeli fighter bombers in 1981.
During the Iran-Iraq war, France was soon supplying Iraq with top level military hardware of its own.
All told, France sold some $25bn-worth of weaponry to Iraq before the UN embargo was imposed after the Gulf War.
A report commissioned by the French parliament published last September puts the value of French exports to Iraq since sanctions were imposed at $3.5bn.
Agnes Levallois, a specialist in business in the Middle East, cites the example of French pharmaceutical firms, all of whom she says sell antibiotics and other basic medicines in Iraq.
Oil the spur
In July 2001, when relations chilled, Saddam froze these companies' contracts, but renewed them once diplomatic relations thawed.
Even in 2001, France sold Iraq $650m-worth of goods, more than any other country, and was the Western country with the largest number of stands at last November's Baghdad Trade Fair.
But above all, the French are interested in Iraqi oil.
Nicolas Sarkis, of Arab Oil and Gas magazine, says France's state-controlled TotalFinaElf is poised to win contracts to drill the largest unexploited oil reserves in the world.
Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi banker who presides the Iraqi National Council - the American-backed organisation supposed to bring democracy to a post-Saddam Iraq - has said that American firms will be given a "preponderant role".
If war is unleashed on Iraq, it will not only be a blow to French diplomacy but to French industry as well.
Does anyone have the photo that was supposed to have appeared on the front page of the Washington Post showing the heads of the German and French delegates substituted with weasel faces?
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,
Evidence? Osama bin Laden attacked America, in part, because he (like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor) assumed that the American's would run like scared children if many Americans were killed in their own land. They get this perception from Americans talking and acting like they are afraid to take an casualities in war. If America engages in war as a response to terror, that would counter this perception, don't you think?
that containment can work,
Really? How do you contain a nuclear power? Is containment working well in North Korea or have we been giving them pay-offs in response to extortion?
Richard Bey on WABC in NYC was saying that he thought we should "keep the pressure" on Saddam and go with more inspections. What he, and others on the left, don't seem to realize is that the "pressure" currently being brought to bear on Saddam is the very real threat of invasion. If you replace the real threat of invasion (and the will to go ahead with it) with strong words, there is no "pressure" on Saddam. And if we threaten force but don't follow through when Saddam doesn't give in, that's essentially crying wolf.
This is why the children of liberals are often so out of control. The parents talk to the children but never follow through with any punishment. The children quickly learn to ignore "Please don't do that" because they know there will be no consequences if they don't listen. Pressure requires consequences. Talk without consequences is simply a lot of hot air.
and that it would be hard to impose stability -- let alone democracy -- on Iraq, especially when you look at Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has had, what, about a year or so to get worked out? If they are so impatient about results in Afghanistan, why are they so patient that something different will happen in Iraq given more time?
And, ultimately, containment means continued slavery and torture for the people of Iraq. Does anyone on the left actually care about them? If all the UN is good for is to maintain the status quo, even if that means a lack of freedom and even abuse, then the UN doesn't seem to be good for very much to me.
NOT ANYMORE. No way in hell Powell will allow that after Pepe LePeu's perfidious performance today.
hehe. those two words said it all.
I'll bet one could never find a book of French war heroes....
I think their most famous battle hero is Joan of Arc.
Even Napoleon wasn't French, so they tried to swindle him into their folklore.
You would be too if you'd never won one
Makes more sense that it would be :-) It was hilarious (found it on another thread).
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