http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?id=37856DED-D77E-464F-8822-35DFD6790358
France is no Eurowimp
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Let's say you're the head of government of a middle-rank power. You have no feelings one way or the other on the morality of things, that being a simplistic Texan cowboy concept. What then should your line on Iraq be?
The first question to ask yourself is: Is Bush serious about war? If your answer is yes, the next question is: Will he win that war?
Answer: Yes, and very quickly. You know that, even if the drooling quagmire predictors of the press don't. So the next question is: How will the Iraqi people feel about it?
Answer: They'll be dancing in the streets. You know that, even if Susan Sarandon and Ed Asner don't. They don't know because, although the "peace" movement claims to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqi people, no Iraqi person wants to put his shoulder anywhere near them. They know the scale of Saddam's murder and torture. And once the vaults are unpadlocked so will the rest of the world. So the obvious question is: If, for the cost of chipping in a couple of fighter jets, you can pass yourself off as an heroic co-liberator of a monstrous tyranny and position yourself for a big piece of the economic action from the new regime, why not go for it? It would appear to be, in the ghastly vernacular of the cretinous Yanks, a "no-brainer."
Ah, but for those with a big sophisticated Continental brain it's all more complicated than that. There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in the world, several of them francophone (hint), but Jacques Chirac is not among them. Say what you like about M. le President -- call him irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt, and almost absurdly conceited. But he's not stupid. The issue for the French is very straightforward: What's in it for us?
The answer to that may vary, but frame the question as a negative and the reply is always the same: What's not in it for France is that America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced. France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and right now the main obstacle to that is the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone's sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America's Rome, or Tonto to Bush's Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya's Little Orphan Annie, fine. The French aren't interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor.
This isn't quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers. As far as I can see, American pop culture only ever has room for one joke about the French. For three decades, the Single French Joke was that they were the guys who thought Jerry Lewis was a genius. I don't particularly see the harm in that myself, at least when compared to thinking, say, Jean-Paul Sartre is a genius. But, since September 11th, the new Single French Joke has been that they're "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," a phrase introduced on The Simpsons but greatly popularized by Jonah Goldberg of National Review. Jonah, you'll recall, recently flayed us Canadians for being a bunch of northern pussies, but it's a measure of the contempt in which he holds our D-list Dominion that we didn't even merit a pithy four-word sneer-in-a-can.
The trouble is the cheese-eating surrender paradigm is insufficient. If you want to go monkey fishing, there's certainly no shortage of Eurowimps: Since the unpleasantness of 60 years ago, the Germans have become as aggressively and obnoxiously pacifist as they once were militarist; they loathe their own armed forces, never mind anybody else's. But France is one of only five official nuclear powers in the world, a status it takes seriously. When Greenpeace were interfering with French nuclear tests in the Pacific, they blew up the damn boat. Even I, a right-wing detester of the eco-loonies, would balk at killing the buggers.
A few weeks ago, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. Don't ask me what's going on: President Wossname represents the southern Wotchamacallit tribe and they're unpopular with natives in the northern province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know, French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d'Orsay but nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7.3 (d) of Hans Blix's hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don't care what you think about it.
So they're not appeasing Saddam. On the matter of Islamic terrorists killing American office workers and American forces killing Iraqi psychopaths, they are equally insouciant. Let's say Saddam has long-range WMDs. If he nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution before responding. If he nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq would be a crater by lunchtime.
It's true that for a couple of centuries the French have not performed impressively on the battlefield per se. But even a surrender monkey can wind up king of the swingers. In the Second World War, half of France was occupied, the rest was run by a collaborationist regime; there were a couple of dozen in the French Resistance listening to the BBC under the bed, and a gazillion on the other side, enthusiastically shipping Jews east. And yet, miracle of miracles, in the post-war order France wound up with one of only five UN Security Council vetoes. Canada did far more heavy lifting and was far more deserving of a seat at the top table. But the point is, despite being deeply compromised and tainted, the French came out a big winner.
Their next ingenious wheeze was to co-opt the new Germany, a country with formidable economic muscle but paralyzed by self-doubt. Overlooked in last week's fuss about Schroeder and Chirac's thumbs-down to Bush was the real meat of their confab: the proposal to create a merged Franco-German citizenship. There's already a "European" citizenship, largely meaningless at the moment but intended (or so it was assumed) to be a legal identity that would eventually supersede national citizenship. Now Schroeder and Chirac have effectively announced that at the heart of the European Union will be a Franco-German superstate of 140 million people around which the Dutch and Austrians and other minor satellites cluster like the princely states around British India.
Even the ostensibly risible constitutional proposal that there should be two Presidents of Europe has a kind of sense: one will be, as a general rule, French or, if necessary, German; the other will be some nonentity from Luxembourg or Denmark. Whatever you think of all this, it's not the behaviour of surrender monkeys. A year ago, David Warren dismissed Canada and other fence-sitters as "spectators in their own fates." That's not the French. The startling suggestion that the French government will fund and run state mosques, in order to obstruct the malign spread of Saudi Wahhabism, may sound kooky to American ears. But to sly French Machiavels, it has the potential of neutering the potential Muslim threat as thoroughly as they permanently neutered the German threat.
Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, declared that "the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." This sounds insane. But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can't beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies.
In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It's time the rest of the West was so clear-sighted.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
France is no Eurowimp
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Let's say you're the head of government of a middle-rank power. You have no feelings one way or the other on the morality of things, that being a simplistic Texan cowboy concept. What then should your line on Iraq be?
The first question to ask yourself is: Is Bush serious about war? If your answer is yes, the next question is: Will he win that war?
Answer: Yes, and very quickly. You know that, even if the drooling quagmire predictors of the press don't. So the next question is: How will the Iraqi people feel about it?
Answer: They'll be dancing in the streets. You know that, even if Susan Sarandon and Ed Asner don't. They don't know because, although the "peace" movement claims to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqi people, no Iraqi person wants to put his shoulder anywhere near them. They know the scale of Saddam's murder and torture. And once the vaults are unpadlocked so will the rest of the world. So the obvious question is: If, for the cost of chipping in a couple of fighter jets, you can pass yourself off as an heroic co-liberator of a monstrous tyranny and position yourself for a big piece of the economic action from the new regime, why not go for it? It would appear to be, in the ghastly vernacular of the cretinous Yanks, a "no-brainer."
Ah, but for those with a big sophisticated Continental brain it's all more complicated than that. There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in the world, several of them francophone (hint), but Jacques Chirac is not among them. Say what you like about M. le President -- call him irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt, and almost absurdly conceited. But he's not stupid. The issue for the French is very straightforward: What's in it for us?
The answer to that may vary, but frame the question as a negative and the reply is always the same: What's not in it for France is that America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced. France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and right now the main obstacle to that is the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone's sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America's Rome, or Tonto to Bush's Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya's Little Orphan Annie, fine. The French aren't interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor.
This isn't quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers. As far as I can see, American pop culture only ever has room for one joke about the French. For three decades, the Single French Joke was that they were the guys who thought Jerry Lewis was a genius. I don't particularly see the harm in that myself, at least when compared to thinking, say, Jean-Paul Sartre is a genius. But, since September 11th, the new Single French Joke has been that they're "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," a phrase introduced on The Simpsons but greatly popularized by Jonah Goldberg of National Review. Jonah, you'll recall, recently flayed us Canadians for being a bunch of northern pussies, but it's a measure of the contempt in which he holds our D-list Dominion that we didn't even merit a pithy four-word sneer-in-a-can.
The trouble is the cheese-eating surrender paradigm is insufficient. If you want to go monkey fishing, there's certainly no shortage of Eurowimps: Since the unpleasantness of 60 years ago, the Germans have become as aggressively and obnoxiously pacifist as they once were militarist; they loathe their own armed forces, never mind anybody else's. But France is one of only five official nuclear powers in the world, a status it takes seriously. When Greenpeace were interfering with French nuclear tests in the Pacific, they blew up the damn boat. Even I, a right-wing detester of the eco-loonies, would balk at killing the buggers.
A few weeks ago, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. Don't ask me what's going on: President Wossname represents the southern Wotchamacallit tribe and they're unpopular with natives in the northern province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know, French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d'Orsay but nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7.3 (d) of Hans Blix's hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don't care what you think about it.
So they're not appeasing Saddam. On the matter of Islamic terrorists killing American office workers and American forces killing Iraqi psychopaths, they are equally insouciant. Let's say Saddam has long-range WMDs. If he nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution before responding. If he nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq would be a crater by lunchtime.
It's true that for a couple of centuries the French have not performed impressively on the battlefield per se. But even a surrender monkey can wind up king of the swingers. In the Second World War, half of France was occupied, the rest was run by a collaborationist regime; there were a couple of dozen in the French Resistance listening to the BBC under the bed, and a gazillion on the other side, enthusiastically shipping Jews east. And yet, miracle of miracles, in the post-war order France wound up with one of only five UN Security Council vetoes. Canada did far more heavy lifting and was far more deserving of a seat at the top table. But the point is, despite being deeply compromised and tainted, the French came out a big winner.
Their next ingenious wheeze was to co-opt the new Germany, a country with formidable economic muscle but paralyzed by self-doubt. Overlooked in last week's fuss about Schroeder and Chirac's thumbs-down to Bush was the real meat of their confab: the proposal to create a merged Franco-German citizenship. There's already a "European" citizenship, largely meaningless at the moment but intended (or so it was assumed) to be a legal identity that would eventually supersede national citizenship. Now Schroeder and Chirac have effectively announced that at the heart of the European Union will be a Franco-German superstate of 140 million people around which the Dutch and Austrians and other minor satellites cluster like the princely states around British India.
Even the ostensibly risible constitutional proposal that there should be two Presidents of Europe has a kind of sense: one will be, as a general rule, French or, if necessary, German; the other will be some nonentity from Luxembourg or Denmark. Whatever you think of all this, it's not the behaviour of surrender monkeys. A year ago, David Warren dismissed Canada and other fence-sitters as "spectators in their own fates." That's not the French. The startling suggestion that the French government will fund and run state mosques, in order to obstruct the malign spread of Saudi Wahhabism, may sound kooky to American ears. But to sly French Machiavels, it has the potential of neutering the potential Muslim threat as thoroughly as they permanently neutered the German threat.
Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, declared that "the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." This sounds insane. But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can't beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies.
In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It's time the rest of the West was so clear-sighted.
© Copyright 2003 National Post