Our War With France (Friedman's Latest From The Padded Room) [View All]

[wellst0nev0ter]

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

http://nytimes.com/2003/09/18/opinion/18FRIE.html

I know, he could have added the stuff about how the French tried what the U.S. was doing in places like Algeria, with little to show for it except for Islamic fanaticism, but we don't want to disrupt his quaint little world, do we?