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If you HAD a "World" Trade Center, and had seen it reduced to screaming carnage...perhaps your smug, self-serving intellectuality would have benefited from the taste of it.

I see what you are saying, but you have to know that France suffered horribly in WWI and WWII. Not just towers, but whole cities were in ruins. Nearly a generation of her young men gone. They know what it is to suffer in their homeland.

Which makes Chirac's actions all the more troubling. They saw first hand what appeasement could lead to. I don't understand how they could not have been right there with us.

Well, we survived the impeached X42, hopefully they will survive Chirac and the socialists that are ruining France.

I see what you are saying, but you have to know that France suffered horribly in WWI and WWII. Not just towers, but whole cities were in ruins. Nearly a generation of her young men gone. They know what it is to suffer in their homeland.

Just to be clear, French losses in WWII on the battlefield were comparatively low. They surrendered quickly. In the battle to drive the Germans out, Americans and Brits did the dying.

The report below is from the Embassy of France in the US. You'll notice that WWI and WWII are combined. Clearly this is done to downplay the comparatively low number of battle losses by French troops in WWII.

FRENCH CASUALTIES IN WWI AND WWII

1,385,000 soldiers died
361,000 were declared missing
4,200,000 were wounded
10% of the active population and 3,5% of the total population died on the battlefields. As a comparison, if this were to happen now in the United States, the number of casualties would reach 10 million.
There would also be 680,000 widows and 760,000 orphans. Throughout Europe, the number of crippled soldiers amounted to 6,500,000.
Between 1914 and 1918, the drops in births in France is estimated at 1 million.

Regarding WWII, between 1939 (when war was declared by France and the United Kingdom) and 1940, 120,000 soldiers died [emphasis mine], not to mention the number of French citizens who died as war prisoners, forced laborers, deported civilians or in acts of resistence against the Nazis during the German Occupation. The amount of suffering occasioned by WWII in France is impossible to assess and should not be forgotten.
Source: Embassy of France in the U.S. - March 18, 2003

We will also keep in mind those whose egos allow them to face the "appeasement" lesson, and await the days when they take the helm.

Meanwhile...time to send the deserving to their rooms without dinner. Perhaps then the voting public will decide to go with what works, and abandon their misguided, shameful, and dangerous posturing.