Mike Irwin
Member
Funny... 
From Reuters
PARIS (Reuters) - It's the diplomatic equivalent of water rolling off a duck's
back. Bashing the French does not beat them down -- au contraire, it only
makes them more convinced they must be right.
The air has been thick with insult these days, both over the Atlantic and
across the Channel, as the United States and Britain pile pressure and
scorn on their reluctant ally to support an attack against Iraq.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant
prima donna of realpolitik" -- the epithets flung at France by the U.S. and
British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about
America's oldest ally.
U.S. officials have hardly been diplomatic either. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has written off France as part of "old Europe" and said its
opposition to emergency NATO (news - web sites) measures to boost
Turkey's defenses is a disgrace.
If all this was meant to bully France into changing its mind, it's not working.
France's reaction has been to redouble its efforts against a U.S.-led war,
blocking NATO war preparations in Turkey and plugging for an extension of
United Nations (news - web sites) arms inspections that an exasperated
Washington insists are now useless.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the easy-going prime minister who rarely speaks about
foreign policy, shot back last Friday at President Bush (news - web sites)'s
"the game is over" statement by saying: "It's not a game, it's not over."
FRENCH LOGIC
Paris media report on the anti-French vitriol seething through U.S. and
British opinion columns with an air of bemused incomprehension, as if to
say: What a faux pas! How could those Anglo-Saxons be so unreasonable?
"The French don't have a very good press in the United States these days,"
the left-wing daily Liberation wrote with sublime understatement Monday.
The conservative daily Le Figaro echoed pride in France's long tradition of
Cartesian logic when it praised Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's plan
for reinforced arms inspections in Iraq.
"Even if it worsens French-American relations, the attempt is in any event
quite logical," it observed.
Pascal Boniface, a leading French world affairs analyst, said Americans
suffered from a Francophobia as bad as the anti-Americanism that's
politically correct in France.
"I was in the U.S. last week and couldn't turn on the television without
hearing nonsense about France," he said.
Anti-Americanism has such deep roots in French thinking that no less than
three serious books on the subject were published last autumn. Bashing
from across the Atlantic hardly counts because the French do not take the
bashers seriously.
France, as the new books show, believes it is special because the values of
liberty, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the 1789 French Revolution
have universal appeal.
But the United States, which declared its independence in 1776 with a
similarly universal view of human rights, has long since overtaken France on
the world stage.
As the Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot
put it in an article echoing the anti-French
mood in the United States:
"France has been in decline since, oh, about
1815, and it isn't happy about it. What
particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful
place in the world has been usurped by the
gauche Americans, with their hamburgers and
blue jeans."
BOTH SIDES' WORST SIDES
What's worse, both states are led by men seen
by the other side as caricatures of all they can't stand in their partner.
Bush's folksy talk, religious piety and unilateral stands go down in France
like nails scratching on a blackboard.
"Bush crystallizes all that we hate in America," Pascal Bruckner, a usually
pro-American essayist, wrote last year.
President Jacques Chirac and the flamboyant Villepin embody for
Americans a haughty arrogance and spineless opportunism they say is the
trademark of French diplomacy.
To rub it in, U.S. commentators recall French collaboration with Nazi
Germany and the U.S. and British-led liberation of France -- a memory the
Gaullist tradition prefers to play down.
In one of the most venomous articles of recent days, the Wall Street
Journal ran a comment by author Christopher Hitchens denouncing Chirac
as "a positive monster of conceit ... the abject procurer for Saddam ... the
rat that tried to roar."
"Let's hope for Jacques Chirac's sake that he doesn't read the Wall Street
Journal and the Elysee Palace forgot to include it in its press review
yesterday," Liberation wrote in a short report on the broadside from the
U.S. business daily.
From Reuters
PARIS (Reuters) - It's the diplomatic equivalent of water rolling off a duck's
back. Bashing the French does not beat them down -- au contraire, it only
makes them more convinced they must be right.
The air has been thick with insult these days, both over the Atlantic and
across the Channel, as the United States and Britain pile pressure and
scorn on their reluctant ally to support an attack against Iraq.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant
prima donna of realpolitik" -- the epithets flung at France by the U.S. and
British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about
America's oldest ally.
U.S. officials have hardly been diplomatic either. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has written off France as part of "old Europe" and said its
opposition to emergency NATO (news - web sites) measures to boost
Turkey's defenses is a disgrace.
If all this was meant to bully France into changing its mind, it's not working.
France's reaction has been to redouble its efforts against a U.S.-led war,
blocking NATO war preparations in Turkey and plugging for an extension of
United Nations (news - web sites) arms inspections that an exasperated
Washington insists are now useless.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the easy-going prime minister who rarely speaks about
foreign policy, shot back last Friday at President Bush (news - web sites)'s
"the game is over" statement by saying: "It's not a game, it's not over."
FRENCH LOGIC
Paris media report on the anti-French vitriol seething through U.S. and
British opinion columns with an air of bemused incomprehension, as if to
say: What a faux pas! How could those Anglo-Saxons be so unreasonable?
"The French don't have a very good press in the United States these days,"
the left-wing daily Liberation wrote with sublime understatement Monday.
The conservative daily Le Figaro echoed pride in France's long tradition of
Cartesian logic when it praised Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's plan
for reinforced arms inspections in Iraq.
"Even if it worsens French-American relations, the attempt is in any event
quite logical," it observed.
Pascal Boniface, a leading French world affairs analyst, said Americans
suffered from a Francophobia as bad as the anti-Americanism that's
politically correct in France.
"I was in the U.S. last week and couldn't turn on the television without
hearing nonsense about France," he said.
Anti-Americanism has such deep roots in French thinking that no less than
three serious books on the subject were published last autumn. Bashing
from across the Atlantic hardly counts because the French do not take the
bashers seriously.
France, as the new books show, believes it is special because the values of
liberty, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the 1789 French Revolution
have universal appeal.
But the United States, which declared its independence in 1776 with a
similarly universal view of human rights, has long since overtaken France on
the world stage.
As the Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot
put it in an article echoing the anti-French
mood in the United States:
"France has been in decline since, oh, about
1815, and it isn't happy about it. What
particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful
place in the world has been usurped by the
gauche Americans, with their hamburgers and
blue jeans."
BOTH SIDES' WORST SIDES
What's worse, both states are led by men seen
by the other side as caricatures of all they can't stand in their partner.
Bush's folksy talk, religious piety and unilateral stands go down in France
like nails scratching on a blackboard.
"Bush crystallizes all that we hate in America," Pascal Bruckner, a usually
pro-American essayist, wrote last year.
President Jacques Chirac and the flamboyant Villepin embody for
Americans a haughty arrogance and spineless opportunism they say is the
trademark of French diplomacy.
To rub it in, U.S. commentators recall French collaboration with Nazi
Germany and the U.S. and British-led liberation of France -- a memory the
Gaullist tradition prefers to play down.
In one of the most venomous articles of recent days, the Wall Street
Journal ran a comment by author Christopher Hitchens denouncing Chirac
as "a positive monster of conceit ... the abject procurer for Saddam ... the
rat that tried to roar."
"Let's hope for Jacques Chirac's sake that he doesn't read the Wall Street
Journal and the Elysee Palace forgot to include it in its press review
yesterday," Liberation wrote in a short report on the broadside from the
U.S. business daily.
