“WHEN BAGHDAD DANCED, FRANCE POUTED:” EuroPundits has a translation of an oped from Le Monde by Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann and Romain Goupil. You really should read it all. But here’s an excerpt:

Friendship gave way to overt hostility, despite the diplomatic smiles and the denials which functioned as confessions: “The Americans aren’t our enemies”…By its intransigence and its promise of a veto “regardless of the circumstances,” our country divided Europe, paralyzed NATO and the UN, destroying the possibility of avoiding a military confrontation through a precise, joint ultimatum that would have forced out the Iraqi dictator. Far from avoiding a war, the “camp of peace” precipitated one by playing Asterix against Uncle Sam. . . .

In the future, we will talk about the hysteria, the collective intoxication that shook France for months on end, the anguish of the Apocalypse that seized our better halves, the almost Soviet ambiance that welded together 90% of the population in a triumph of monolithic thought, allergic to the slightest dissent. In the future, we will have to study the media’s partisan coverage of the war—with few exceptions, this coverage was more activist than objective, minimizing the horrors of the Baathist tyranny in order to better reproach the Anglo-American expedition, guilty of all crimes, all problems, all misfortunes in the region. . . .

Let’s face it: Anti-Americanism is not an accident that happened over-night or a simple reticence in response to the Bush Administration. Anti-Americanism is a political creed that unites one person to another, in spite of their differences—the Front national and the Greens, socialists and conservatives, communists and separatists…On the left as well as on the right, it is rare to find someone who did not give in to this “nationalism of imbeciles” which is unfailingly symptomatic of resentment and decline.

Read the whole thing.