Pentagon adviser: France 'no longer ally'

UPI ^ | 2/4/2003 | Martin Walker

[Mossad1967]

France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance" the head of the Pentagon's top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday...

[DeFault User]

Er, 1066? There has to be an exception to everything. Or perhaps we can attribute that victory to the Normans who were Viking descendants.

[Shermy]

From last year:

France against publishing secret documents on Iraq's weapons programs

[PhiKapMom]

That would be quite a legacy! One I would love to see!

[johnb838]

Sabotaging the US in general is just the ticket to increase the relative leverage of "old Europe" without having to work or spend for it. Our interests and those of Europe are really at odds these days. We need to get out of NATO.

[MississippiMan]

I like this guy!

[stilts]

You're history of France has me dying in the aisles. Very funny. You made my day.

[buccaneer81]

[MadIvan]

Blimey. And I thought our historical dislike of the French was not something that could be duplicated.

Regards, Ivan

[steveegg]

Er, 1066? There has to be an exception to everything. Or perhaps we can attribute that victory to the Normans who were Viking descendants.

That would be correct. There was very little French influence in the Normans.

A better example of an exception would be Napoleon before he decided that Moscow would be a good winter adventure.

[Bernard Marx]

Thanks for posting the actual story. There's a HUGE difference between the words "France 'no longer ally'" in the headline and Perle's actual statement: "France is no longer the ally it once was..."

There's also the fact that Perle is a civilian, not a member of the Bush administration. So what we have here is a 'journalistic' attempt to hype an important story into a sensational one.

I'll be very interested in reading/seeing Perle's reaction to this attempt to deliberately misquote him.

[Admin Moderator]

You don't need to excerpt UPI.

[Man of the Right]

France is your conniving, obnoxious mother-in-law who hates your guts but she is still your wife's family. The way to manage the French is to set limits. You focus on your own self-interest as they do, you let them know every time you catch them double-dealing behind your back, you explain what the consequences will be for actions they take contrary to vital U.S. interests, and when there's a temporary community of self-interest, you exploit it. Yesterday, the Clemenceau battle group left Toulon for the Gulf. Some units of the Rapid Reaction Force are on alert. This may be hard to believe, but despite what Chirac told Blair yesterday, the French will participate in the Iraq coalition in their own self-interest. As in Desert Storm, they will wait until the last minute to extract the maximum concessions from the U.S. We should give them none.

[r9etb]

From a diplomatic perspective, Perle's comments are either incredibly stupid, or a play to members of the EU that are sick of the French.

Considering the newspaper ad of a couple of weeks back, supporting us against Iraq, and signed by 8 EU heads of state, I'd say it's the latter.

In which case Perle's comments basically boil down to: "be ruled by France and Germany as part of the EU, or let the U.S. protect you from them as part of NATO."

[steveegg]

And I thought our historical dislike of the French was not something that could be duplicated.

Considering that some of your ancestors decided to create the US, and more than a few Germans (where the national sport is the Rhein-Paris Military Rally) also made their way here, I'm not entirely surprised that we've finally started to catch up to the British dislike of their corss-Channel "neighbors".

[stilts]

One worthy addition. The Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo celebrates the triumphant victory of a group of Mexican farmers armed with sticks and tools over a professional and well armed French troops.

(Not to be confused with Mexican Independence Day: September 16.)

[John H K]

Hey, I enjoy beating up on the French as much as anyone else, but that list is selective and riddled with errors.

George Washington was forced to surrender Fort Necessity by the French in the French and Indian War, THEN was part of Braddock's expedition which got crushed by the French and Indians at the Battle of the Monongahela.

List also omits Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstadt, The Marne, Verdun, etc.

[John H K]

Err, that guy's list you were commenting on, not your list....

[Humidston]

Bump for someone with the guts to tell the truth!

[jaime1959]

So says the extremist chicken hawk, Richard Perle. I guess the bellicose draft evaders who sat Vietnam want us to take on France next?

"The chairman of Rumfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) and one of the most visible advocates of military action to oust Saddam, Richard Perle, spent Vietnam at the University of Chicago (along with Wolfowitz) before joining the staff of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who at the time was among the last remaining Democrats to support the Vietnam war.


"Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad," Hagel quipped recently, earning him an outraged rebuke by the editors at the Wall Street Journal who called the crack "particularly shabby." Another highly visible super-hawk and Perle protégé, CSP founder-director Frank Gaffney, also avoided military service during Vietnam."

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14070