Posted on 08/22/2003 4:35:57 PM PDT by Pokey78
'The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell," thundered George Galloway last month. "Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour."
As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the périphérique and it's 100 degrees at midnight in the pissoir on the Metro. To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France.
That would make George's brutal Iraqi summer about one five-thousandth as lethal as the brutal Gallic summer, which has killed more people than the brutal Afghan winter (now 23 months behind schedule), the brutal Iraqi summer and the searing heat of the Guantanamo torture camps combined and multiplied by a thousand.
Certainly, Iraq has its problems. Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit and veg markets.
Now that his old pal and nuclear client has been removed from power, M Chirac is utterly irrelevant to the future of Iraq. But surely France still falls within his jurisdiction, doesn't it?
And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it. A few weeks back, with three fatal cases of cholera, the Humanitarian Lobby was already shrieking that we stood on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe.
France isn't on the edge, it's in the abyss. When I motored round Iraq a couple of months ago, the hospital wards were well below capacity. Yet in France the entire health system – or that percentage of it not spending August at the beach – is stretched beyond its limits (35 hours a week, 44 weeks a year). Why aren't Médecins Sans Frontières demanding to be allowed in to take over?
There's an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different disasters on American TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don't seem to care – or not too much, and not with any great urgency.
Bernard Mazeyrie, managing director of France's largest undertakers, told the New York Times that several of the bereaved were in no hurry to bury their aged loved ones: "Some, he said, informed of the death of relatives, postponed funerals, not to interrupt the August 15 holiday weekend, and left the bodies in the refrigerated hall." Au bord de la mer? Ou au bord de ma mère? Hmm. Tough call.
I don't know what M Chirac heard in the dépanneurs and resto-bars of Quebec this week, but what I heard south of the border was complete amazement at how a nominally First World country could be so insouciant about an entirely avoidable Third World death toll. President Bush and the entire Washington press corps are spending a month in heat equal to the brutal Parisian summer, and he's playing golf in it all day while they stand around watching; in Phoenix tomorrow and Monday, it will be an unremarkable 105. This isn't about the weather.
In Paris this spring, a government official explained to me how Europeans had created a more civilised society than America - socialised healthcare, shorter work weeks, more holidays. We've just seen where that leads: gran'ma turned away from the hospital to die in an airless apartment because junior's sur la plage. M Chirac's somewhat tetchy suggestion that his people should rethink their attitude to the elderly was well taken. But Big Government inevitably diminishes its citizens' capacity to take responsibility, to the point where even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the state should do something about.
Meanwhile, Maggie Pernot wrote the other day to chide me for my continued defence of the Rumsfeld Death Camps at Guantanamo. The prisoners, she complains, are "kept in tiny, chainlink outdoor cages where they were likely to be rained upon". In fact, they have sloping roofs and cool concrete floors, perfect for the climate. If they had solid walls rather than airy wire mesh, they'd be Parisian sweatboxes and everyone would be dead. By contrast, if those thousands of French pensioners had been captured by the Marines and detained by Rummy in Cuba, they'd be alive today.
Mme Pernot writes from St Julien, France. That's right: she's surrounded by an actual humanitarian scandal on all sides but she'd rather obsess about an entirely fictional one. Heat getting to you, Madame? Or just the unusual odour from the flat next door?
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Socialism is a disease.
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