Americans have also always had a love affair with la belle France.
However,
"France, by consistently blocking action against Saddam, unquestionably propped up one of the vilest regimes on the planet"
And it was far worse than that. France covertly and in stunning treachery allied itself with and supported a quasi-Nazi enemy that had attacked the United States.
American contempt for Chirac, Villepin, and the French people who support them is the same contempt they have for Adolf Hitler, Klaus Barbie, the French collaborators, and the rest of the Nazi thugs.
French betrayal of America is deeply resented, but the real contempt is for the 21st-century version of Naziism that has taken control of France.
We may have this liberation of France all wrong. The French may have preferred the Nazi occupation. I don't believe they resented the Holocaust. The French antipathy towards Jews motivates their Middle East policies.
The French have historically been moral-cowards for many decades. Known terrorists were granted safe passage through their country on the assumption that if they are kind to terrorists then they would bomb and gun and knife people in other countries, rather than in France. The French are the original George Soros Socialist-Libertarian Harm-Reduction advocates.