National Journal: The French Were Right

[Paschall]

By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003 (cover story)

Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11 world (and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do): The French were right. Let's say it again: The French -- yes, those "cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United States so pungently called them -- were right.

"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President Jacques Rene Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16 interview on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq. "Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and may be very dangerous," Chirac advised. And this was not some last-minute heads-up, but the culmination of a full-brief argument that the French advanced against the perils of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over months at the United Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris, Prague, and Washington. There were, of course, other war critics in Europe and elsewhere, but nobody presented the arguments more insistently or comprehensively than did the French, God bless 'em. ...

One big reason the French were right is that they were thinking along the lines that Americans are generally apt to think -- that is, in a cautious, pragmatic way, informed by their own particular trial-and-error experience, in this case as an occupier forced out of Algeria and as a front-line battler, long before 9/11, against global Islamic terrorist groups.

The Bush administration, by contrast, approached Iraq the way the French are often thought to approach large world problems -- with a grandiose sweep of the theoretical hand, a tack exemplified by the big-ideas neoconservative crowd, whose own thinking, ironically, draws on European political philosophy. So as the administration rethinks Iraq, the way back to a sound position may lie at home, in the great but neglected tradition of American Pragmatism. And then everyone can forget about the French.

More... http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2003/1107nj1.htm

[weldon_berger]

1. Great find. Thanks.

If you're not already aware of it, another of the National Journal family of publications is Government Executive - it too often has some very penetrating articles and editorials.

[Paschall]

2. You're welcome. I wouldn't have known about this story...

...if yesterday's evening news in France hadn't done a report on it, with an interview of the National Journal editor, who said response had been overwhelmingly positive. I guess Faux and CNN didn't mention it, huh? ;-)

[teryang]

3. "The grandiose sweep of the theoretical hand"

...was little more than a life ring thrown to thoughtful types who need some rationalization to go to war. There is old concept that in a corrupt society intellectuals are out of fashion until the corrupt need an excuse to go to war.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Orwell

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

James Madison, April 20, 1795