ken [ny)

October 03, 2003, 8:30 a.m.
Let France Do It
Denis Boyles
NRO

After a weeklong wind-up, the U.S. has made its formal pitch to the
U.N. - and, according to the EuroPress, it was high and outside. Kofi
Annan said he was "disappointed" in it. The Germans, as Suddeutscher
Zeitung noted , were more cir***spect. And according to this report in
Le Monde, the French ambassador said, sadly, that the U.S. proposals
just didn't "respond to [French] hopes."

The new French strategy seems to be to play a much more
passive-aggressive role with respect to the U.S. - as opposed to their
prewar stance, which was violently pacifistic. On September 28, French
foreign minister Dominique de Villepin previewed the French position
when he explained to Jean-Pierre Elkabbach on France's Europe 1 radio
(oddly missing from the Elkabbach archive) that the situation in Iraq
is "like a big wheel, with the occupation authorities at the center."
At the moment, continued Villepin, "all the spokes of this wheel are
being formed, defining themselves, against the American and British
occupation regime....What we must do is take the occupation regime
from the hub of the wheel and replace it with Iraqi sovereignty."

The logic of Villepin is that Bush wouldn't be asking for help if
things were actually improving in Iraq. Besides, the daily press makes
it clear that Iraq is a growing disaster. Lining up France squarely
behind Howard Dean and CNN, Villepin told listeners that in Iraq, "We
must see things as they really are. The situation is not good. Indeed,
it is bad. There is a spiral of violence and terrorism..." And, he
added, insufficient security to even begin letting the U.N. help.

Reality check: According to the antiwar zealots at Lunaville.org, on
average, one Coalition soldier dies every day in Iraq, for one reason
or another. Could be a rocket grenade, could be a traffic accident,
could be a broken heart. That's the lowest casualty rate since
hostilities began, down from 1.39 deaths per day in August. Some
spiral. (In August in France, meanwhile, during the heat wave, 500
people died every day because of neglect and French governmental
incompetence.)

So, let's just say we gave the U.N. the leading role in Iraq, and
buttressed the whole operation with the genius of French military
might. How would we do?

To find out, let's take a look at the French-led U.N. mission in Ivory
Coast. In that once-calm and prosperous corner of the Big Nowhere,
happy Ivorians used to drive Mercedes and buy mutual funds, just like
the rest of us.

But then the tribes in the northern half of the country, who just
happen to be Muslim, decided to wage war on the non-Muslims in the
south.

Because Ivory Coast is in what France perceives to be its sphere of
influence (they speak French in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital), France
went to the U.N. and got a stamp of approval on something called
"Operation Licorne" and brought the combatants together in the
Marcoussis Accords, which called for the usual: The government sort of
surrenders, the rebels are brought in, there's a transitional phase,
then democracy rises like a chimney sweep from the ashes. To give the
whole show some special effects and the ring of truth, they started
spending a million euros a day.

That was a year ago. How are they doing?

According to the U.N.'s ReliefWeb, here's what happens when you put
France at the hub of the wheel:

Social services and local government collapse. "Basic social services,
schools, health services, agriculture, trade, everything's getting
worse," Besida Tonwe of the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told AFP.

Disease rises. "Illnesses that had been held in check are beginning to
kill again and malnutrition, which was previously unthinkable in Ivory
Coast, has reappeared."

Doctors vanish and hospitals close. "In the north and west about 80
percent of health services are said to be not functioning and
four-fifths of staff had not returned to their posts one year after
the crisis broke."

Epidemic diseases reemerge. "Measles, meningitis and cholera have
reappeared."
600,000 people are displaced.
Refugees increase. 300,000 immigrant laborers flee the country. So do
at least 50,000 Ivorians.
Schools fall into ruin. Schools are closed, looted, or overcrowded.
You get a bumper crop of orphans. The number of AIDS orphans is
expected to rise from 420,000 to 720,000 next year.
But a famine in agriculture. "Agriculture and trade have likewise been
hard hit with a slump in income, causing general impoverishment with
all the predictable effects on nourishment and health of the
population, say U.N. relief agencies, predicting a drop in next year's
harvest."

France has been a conflicted leader in Ivory Coast. For one thing,
France has a huge and growing Muslim population, and they're all on
the side of the rebels - as the government discovered when it tried to
arrest some of the rebel leaders in Paris, only to release them when
Muslims in both Paris and the northern districts of Ivory Coast
squawked. For another, the French method of "peacekeeping" is to put
soldiers on the ground, concentrate them in a small area, then declare
peace in the place where the soldiers are - but not where they aren't.

The French fiction is that they are working with the rebels and the
government to move the country back to a minimum of security, but in
fact the government in Ivory Coast is make-believe. Bremer's Iraqi
governing council is the Court of the Sun King in comparison. Even
Europe 1's Elkabbach had to ask, "If the French army leaves the Ivory
Coast, how many minutes will the government survive?" The question
sent Villepin into a fit of turbocharged platitudes.

Then, earlier this week, the rebel factions with whom France was
supposed to be working had a falling out and, according to this report
in Liberation, 23 people were killed in a provincial center when one
group of rebels stormed a bank and others tried to move in on them. Le
Monde carried the news that the incident might even cause France to
consider peacekeeping in places where there is no peace.

Twenty-three people in one afternoon in a country that has supposedly
been under the care of French-led U.N. peacekeepers for a year. If it
had been a GI tripping over a landmine in Baghdad, it would be a
"spiral of violence and terrorism." But where all you have is a
Reuters and an AFP guy bumping into each other on a dash for cover,
it's just another day in what Villepin called "the spirit of the
Marcoussis accords." By "spirit" he means "ghost," because if last
month was any indication, the U.N.'s mission in Ivory Coast is dead.

NOTES
Dead Man Talking. One more warning to the Tories, this one in today's
Daily Telegraph, where Alice Thompson bids farewell, practically, to
the clueless Iain Duncan Smith on the eve of the Conservative-party
conference in Blackpool. "From his green boiled sweets to his manic
laughter, he has not managed to convince the voters. We still don't
know what he stands for: the vulnerable, Middle England, inner cities,
the countryside? We know more about his passions for fishing and his
father than his political views." Probably just as well. The Tories
are the only party in the U.K. who could make electoral sense out of
an anti-EU platform, but under Smith, they'll never figure it out.

The health of the Pope is on everyone's mind, as well as on the front
pages of some European papers. The IHT carries Frank Bruno's New York
Times piece , for example, quoting Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of
Vienna as saying the pope was "approaching the last days and months of
his life." The Frankfurter Allgemeine says the same thing, and so does
the Corriere della Sera. If it's true, Osservatore Romano, the
official Vatican newspaper, shows no sign of it. The headline items
there (.pdf alert!): a papal audience with the president of Lithuania,
trouble in Baghdad, and a special report on the role of Christianity
in the EU. Why? My guess is the OR knows we're all approaching the
last days and months of our lives. You, me, Frank Bruno, and His
Holiness. You have to pay attention.

Still looks like Bill Maher to me. Villepin's arrogance is beginning
to irritate even the French. As Jon Vinocur happily explains in the
IHT, Villepin and Chirac have alienated the U.S., most of Europe, and
whatever remains of a French intelligentsia.

"At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest,
there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French
intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted
now, is not something Europe wants - or France merits," Vinocur
writes, pointing to the growing popularity of books such as France in
Free Fall, French Arrogance, and Ouest Contre Ouest. In that last
book, Andre Glucksmann argues that the "central question of the future
[is] not hegemony or multipolarity, the key French terms illustrating
the Chirac government's seeming obsession about the United States and
its desire to counter the Americans, but civilization versus nihilism,
and whether the West together could make a fight to protect
civilization."

The science of demographics. In France, the birth rate is lower than
Jacques Chirac's popularity numbers, and politicians, worried about
the impact on pension schemes, are in a sweat. But scientists have
come up with a solution! According to Liberation, they've started
cloning rats. Wrong rodent!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~


Ken (NY)
Chairman,
Department Of Redundancy Department,
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC)
____________________________________
email:
http://www.geocities.com/bluesguy68/email.htm

Q: What the hardest thing about rollerblading?
A: Telling your parents you’re ***.

xanadoo

US assholes should just admit they are nuaghty human trash, cheating,
plotting, threatening, deceiving, and should ONCE FOR ALL , be the
execitionners of INTERNATIONAL decisions. JUST the executionners: REDNECKS
have no BRAINS
"Ken [NY)" <email@Below.Text> a écrit dans le message de news:
7tbtnvof2920khvr21p0ut1pqqs6kel9dn@4ax.com...

steven hargrave

Another 5 minute tirade against France. Bullshit. If we wanna throw throw
stones, we better move outta this damn glass house uncle sam has built.
You know the glass house one I'm talking about.

It's the glass house that keeps killing and maiming Vietnamese with the
after affects of agent orange. It's the glass house of supporting regimes
that run death squads as a matter of standard operating procedure. It's
the glass house of overthrowing every elected government uncle sam
disagrees with. It's the glass house of gulf war syndrome. It's the glass
house of spreading DU over vast areas of the EU and the Middle East. It's
the glass house of systematic criminal activity.

This anti-French rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen to deflect us
from seeing the crime and corruption of our own politicians. Yet another
round of complete and utter bullshit.


Steve Hargrave

arache

Good piece thanks for posting it. It's interesting to see that when
justified commentary against anyone but the Yanks is made it's apparently
some form of distraction. I believe that when it truly comes to not giving a
damn about the third world, or international opinion the French are world
champions, after them it's probably the Chinese.
Come post in uk.current-events.terrorism mate, wellaimed and accurate
criticism goes down a storm there.
cheers,

ken [ny)

Sorry, my cable provider does not carry that group. Thanks
anyway.
Cordially,
Ken (NY)
Chairman,
Department Of Redundancy Department,
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC)
____________________________________
email:
http://www.geocities.com/bluesguy68/email.htm

Q: What the hardest thing about rollerblading?
A: Telling your parents you’re ***.

kouyu

[snip, France is bad, I tell you is very bad, etc...and so on]

I wonder if soc.culture.french is the proper newsgroup to post
Frenchbashing, really.

However, considering the great number of people interested in that
wonderful activity, I suggest to create the newsgroup

soc.itellyou.franceisverybad

in order to share that hobby and not to be disturbed by some casual post
that would consider anything positive and constructive related with a
country named France.

Please vote for creating "soc.itellyou.franceisverybad" newsgroup!


************************************************** *************
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein

david t

Interesting. France isn't responsible for what it's doing now but the
US is responsible for what it did 30 years ago? At least the US
learned its lesson and got out of Vietnam. We lost that one just the
same as the French lost that before us. Vietnam is a tie in the
ineptness of both countries, not a cut against the US.


No, puppy, is point is the glass house you're living in. The article
points out that the French complain about the US involvement in Iraq
at the exact same time as the French **** up in the Ivory Coast.
Please have an adult help you reread the article he posted.

Interesting that you're not able to actually disagree with any of the
facts, just call them "rhetoric" and then blow your own smokescreen to
try to obscure your lack of reasoning.