SEEING THE LIGHT: Reader Mark Falcoff sends a translation of an article that appeared in Le Figaro today — there’s another one over at The Command Post too:
AFTER THE WAR, WE MUST RENEW OUR ALLIANCES
By Pierre Lellouche, Jean-Jacques Descamps, Herbe Mriton, Jerome Riviere and Michele Tabarot*
[from Le Figaro, Paris, this morning’s edition]
Up till now we have been nothing more than a handful of members of the French national assembly publicly troubled by the official attitude towards the Iraqi crisis, notably insofar as it applies to our traditional allies. We have said quite simply that we should associate our efforts towards creating joint pressure- diplomatic and military–to achieve the disarmament of Iraq without automatically recurring to war, but without excluding that possibility either.
We also said at that time that in declaring in advance and under all circumstances that we would refuse to go to war we were simply encouraging Saddam Hussein to play for more time. We said, finally, that such an attitude did not in fact tend to avoid war but rather would inevitably lead to it outside the framework of the UN, precisely the opposite of the objective supposedly sought by French diplomacy.
For having hewed to that language, very much in isolation, and for having reminded everyone of the million deaths caused by Ssaddam Hussein, we were tarred as partisans of the hateful “camp of warmongers”. The war having begun, we saw the unfolding of a veritable campaign of disinformation, with a view to fashioning France as a kind of herald of the “camp of peace” opposed to the inhumane action of the Anglo-Americans. We also witnessed the procession of Iraqi flags in PAris accompanied by cries, “Long live Saddam, death to the Jews!”
We saw our diplomacy, traditionally jealous of its independence but also in solidarity with our allies, caricatured by a neutralism tainted by pacifism and violent expressions of anti-Americanism. Finally, to our great shame, we saw a third of the French population in opinion surveys openly wish for the victory of Saddam, and still others to profane in a particularly ignoble fashion a British military cemetery at Etaples, in the north of France. . . .
It is not however time to engage in recriminations over the diplomatic failure that has brought about precisely what everyone feared: a war without the approval of the UN, led by those who had the means to carry it out, accepted in silence by those who did not wish the victory of Saddam Hussein, and therefore indirectly of fundamentalist Muslims.
It is time, on the other hand, to signal out those irresponsible people who–still too numerous in our country–sit comfortably in front of their television sets, secretly hoping that the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq will be defeated, or now, when victory seems certain, hope for the “Lebanon-ization” of Iraq, a kind of gigantic Gaza which would transform that country into a new urban Vietnam for America. . . .
Even if our friendships can evolve, the hard nut to crack remains that which links us for more than two centuries, to that country which allowed us to vanquish Nazism and Communism, and not with some adventurer based on tactical or economic considerations wholly at variance with our moral and cultural values. We will have need of the Western alliance in the future, in a world decidedly more chaotic and dangerous than the one to whose stability we had become accustomed during the half-century of cold war.
*Deputies in the National Assembly representing the UMP party, from Paris, Indre-et-Loire, la Drome, and Alpes-Maritimes.
Interesting. I’m glad to see at least a bit of sense dawning. And that some French thinkers are wishing for Iraq to become like Lebanon tells us all we need about the extent to which they actually had the best interests of Iraqis at heart — and makes me wonder how much of a role France has played in making Lebanon turn out the way it has.