"France sucks."
"Yeah, friggen cheese monkeys."
Posted on 05/11/2003 5:05:52 PM PDT by fightinJAG
Walker's World: France touts its military By Martin Walker UPI Chief International Correspondent From the International Desk Published 5/11/2003 5:50 AM View printer-friendly version
PARIS, May 11 (UPI) -- The helicopters swooped in low over the sea as the transport planes flew in high to drop their paratroops inland and the Marines charged ashore from their amphibious vehicles. Offshore, the sleek gray warships were hidden by the smoke from their own barrages of fire as the attack went in from land and sea and air.
There might have been no enemy, and only an appreciative audience of 10,000 friendly and cheering civilians, but the attack of the French military on the Prado beach near the Mediterranean port of Marseilles went off without a hitch. And it looked terrific, a display of efficient and frightening modern warfare.
The scene has been repeated across France in the last three days. In Paris, almost 100,000 people came to watch the military parades in the Champs de Mars, by the tomb of Napoleon.
In the provincial capital of Limoges, in the heart of deepest France, the 5,000 troops of the 3rd Mechanized Brigade built temporary bridges and floating armored rafts to stage crossings of the river Dordogne with mock artillery barrages before adoring crowds. Almost every French military base, with the exception of the ports of the French nuclear submarines, has opened to the public.
At the quaysides of Bordeaux, usually used to ship the wine of the region, the experimental minesweeper 'Thetis' and the training ship 'Leopard' welcomed all comers. Airbases at La Rochelle, Bergerac and Le Pau opened their gates and offered free flights and guided tours of the Mirage-2000 and Rafalle fighters.
The country whose opposition to the war in Iraq has given weight to the judgment of American analyst Robert Kagan that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" has gone onto the attack. The target this time is the French people, as the French army, navy and air force try to attract recruits and gain public support.
France claims to be the country that invented national service, with the "levee en masse," the call to arms that summoned the French people to defend the Revolution of 1789 against the vengeful monarchies of old Europe. As "the school of the Republic," the French army always claimed a special place in the hearts of the people.
Conscription to the barracks became the unifying principle of a country that Gen. Charles De Gaulle said was impossible to govern, because it produced over 300 different kinds of cheese. What he meant was that France was so varied, so deeply regional in its roots and its dialects as in its in local food and cuisine, that it needed some exterior force to hold it together. For the past two centuries, that binding force was the army and the common experience of national service.
But 18 months ago, the last conscript left the barracks and France now has a professional military, and the government fears that a worrisome gap is growing between the public and its soldiers. As a result, the Ministry of Defense has called the week's military open days to show off its skills and its welcome for the French taxpaying public that pays the bills.
France's highly centralized government has gone about this massive public-relations campaign with its usual efficiency. Each of the country's 30,000 communes has been told to assign one elected council member to be the contact person for the military, smoothing the way for school visits and recruitment campaigns. The laws have been changed to make it easier for members of the military reserve to keep their jobs and accumulate pension rights when they are called to serve.
Each regional military command has been ordered to prepare a "mobile attraction" that can be taken to schools and colleges showing French troops serving in Kosovo, Bosnia, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan and the Central African Republic.
"The image of the French army is improving because we are engaged on causes based on a vision of human rights and international justice and the French people sympathize with that," says General Georges Ladeveze, commandant of the South-West. "We in the armed forces stand ready to intervene anywhere that our government feels the need to display the solidarity of France."
But even with unemployment climbing back into double digits, the French military is straining to reach its recruitment targets -- a task not helped by the signal absence of French troops from the most televised military action of recent years, the war in Iraq.
France-German summits that talk grandly of building a European military force separate from NATO, with the quasi-military tasks of peacekeeping, sit oddly alongside this week's display of military prowess with their evocations of a distinctively French glory.
However good the French helicopters and warships and the mock invasions of Marseilles, and however many recruits they attract, the real question will hinge on France's leaders because without the political will to deploy them the forces have essentially a symbolic meaning.
But last month 100,000 were protesting the use of military power. Oh, that was U.S. power.
Or sumpin like that.. :)
les primates capitulards toujours en quete de fromage
OH, so they're on a double secret mission based on a vision. It all makes sense now. BWHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!! The french need to accept their lot as the laughing stock of the world.
Well, not to mention protection of a few oil contracts. Tell me again, mon General, who was on the side of human rights in Iraq and who was protecting oil interests? One clue - TotalFinaElf isn't from Texas.
It is unfortunate that French youth have to face a choice between subsidized unemployment and a permanent student status, or experiencing what the French Foreign Legion describes as a "mouthful of rocks" in military service. It is no wonder that they are running a little short of their recruiting goals. One needs, after all, something a bit more inspiring for which to sacrifice one's freedom and perhaps one's life, than the agricultural tariffs that protect unionized French farmers and the ability to plunder whatever African nation is top on the list du jour. That is not the stuff of Verdun.
The problem, of course, is that there are two different and conflicting aims at work here. The terminally self-righteous spoiled children of the "antiwar" movement have little inclination to undergo the rigors of military service in pursuit of the past glories of French nationalism. Ten or twelve or twenty years of undergraduate studies tend, after all, to put one in an intellectual sphere quite above the grime of infantry duty in the Cote d'Ivoire. Such luminaries as Sartre found it preferable, and safer, to construct a heroic revisioniste military career after the shooting stopped.
And even then, victory is elusive and maybe even impossible.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that the circus went so badly for France.
"Oh great! Give me the one with all the monsters!" - Homer
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