Posted on 03/26/2003 1:36:47 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Herewith six surreal acts in search of a play:
ACT I: Almost everything the distinguished French foreign minister says smells like last decade's Roquefort, but now and then one of his statements achieves a surreal peak. Consider this beaut of a line from the oh-so-honorable Dominique de Villepin:
"Everything must be tried to preserve the unity of the Security Council."
Everything except agreeing with the United States to take any real action against a murderous tyrant who has defied every Final Opportunity the U.N. has given him.
Ah, well, maybe it makes sense in French.
It occurs that M. de Villepin would be the perfect choice to deliver the eulogy for the U.N. Security Council; any authority it ever had is dying before our eyes, and M. de Villepin has the unctuous air of a fashionable undertaker. He'd be perfect in the role.
The French performed much the same service for the old League of Nations. They've had practice. Yes, the more things change, the more appeasement remains the same. And produces the same smell.
Act II: When it comes to writing for the theater of the absurd, Eugene Ionesco has nothing on White House press briefings. Here's a question to presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer from Terry Moran of ABC: "What is the administration's assessment of the likelihood of the risk that Saddam Hussein -- with his back up against the wall, with war seeming almost inevitable -- will open up his arsenal of germs and chemicals and disperse them to terrorists?"
Can these be the same germs and chemicals that Saddam Hussein has assured the world (a) he doesn't have, and (b) he would never give to terrorists?
Act III: Meanwhile in Baghdad, Hussein's regime -- which needs changing more than ever -- agreed to provide the United Nations with documentation proving that it had destroyed all its stores of anthrax and nerve gas. You know, the documentation it swore didn't exist. Like its anthrax and nerve gas.
Act IV: Jacques Chirac, the very picture of cultivated neo-Vichy France, says he'd now be willing to give Saddam Hussein only 30 days to disarm -- if the U.N.'s inspectors would go along. Gosh, if he'd only made the same statement 30 days ago . the U.N.'s inspectors wouldn't have gone along, either.
Saddam Hussein isn't the only actor in this French farce who's playing games.
Act V: The government of Iraq (His Exc. Saddam Hussein, Sole Prop.) now has handed over to the U.N.'s inspectors videotapes of those mobile biological weapons labs that don't exist.
Act VI: You can relax. And not just because the U.N. Security Council is going to see to the world's security, what with France, Russia and still Communist China all members in good standing, each with veto power. But because the U.N.'s commission on human rights has just opened its session under the chairmanship of -- hold your hats - Libya!
O frabjous day. To quote the press release from Reporters Without Borders on the opening address from the Libyan delegate, her honorableness Najat Al-Hajjaji: "Censorship, arbitrary detention, jailings, disappearances, torture -- at last the U.N. has appointed someone who knows what she's talking about."
And that's not all. France's foreign minister, the imitable Dominique de Villepin, was due to address the commission, too. What a show! But the curtain is falling fast on this whole farce as, to quote the stage directions, Reality Intrudes.
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