The French Were Right

[Like2Talk]

after an exchange of messages with Canajew, I shall post this article from the National Journal.

It is not meant to attract hatred, though it certainly will.



I will post it in a series of small pieces, to avoid 'carpet bombing' and for clarity

The French Were Right

By Paul Starobin, National Journal


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.

But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed to the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad idea, but that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to Western interests and to the larger war on terror. And now the administration is finding itself in an increasingly unhappy situation in Iraq, with its 130,000-strong contingent there the target of a sophisticated and lethal guerrilla campaign waged by foreign Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to Congress's backing of the president's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the White House strains to explain the failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction, whose supposed presence in the country, after all, was a prime rationale for the war. Even avid war proponents concede that the United States is in for "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a recently leaked memo. America, in short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own making. Leave it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of predicament. The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1944 play, on the suffering that human beings tend to visit on themselves, No Exit.

[NewsGuy]

Like2Talk,

The French were absolutely wrong on nearly everything they predicted in Iraq. But that of course, is not surprising.

The Arab Republic of France headed by President Abu Chirac, has always been an ally, weapons dealer, and political fig leaf for every corrupt Muslim dictator, including of course Saddam Hussein.

The "warnings" given by France were only designed to protect their massive -- and largely illegal -- business dealings in Iraq. And those "warnings" all turned out to be nonsense.

France warned about a "bloodbath" of civilians -- that never happened. They warned about an American defeat -- that never happened. They warned about the Arab world's big backlash against America -- that never happened either, although the Arabs have always and will continue to hate America. The French warned about chaos resulting in other Arab countries -- that never happened.

So far, the only thing that has happened, in fact, is that 52 million Iraqis have been freed of the French-supported Saddam tyranny, while America continues to make progress against sporadic resistance. Once Saddam is captured or killed (and we all know that's just a matter of time), the rest of the resistance will stop altogether if Iran is dealt with properly.

A democratically elected Iraqi government is on its way through American efforts, and economic recovery is also on its way, despite French efforts to sabotage both democracy and economic recovery in Iraq.

So, I find the subject of this thread to be as far from the truth as Abu Chirac's statement "My American friends..."

[Kev]

March 2003

The Chirac/Saddam relationship goes back to the mid-1970s when Chirac was France's premier and travelled to Baghdad to meet the No. 2 man in the Iraqi government, vice president Saddam Hussein.

The pair got on exceedingly well, and among other things, by the end of his visit Chirac agreed to sell Iraq nuclear reactors.

Saddam came to Paris in 1975. Chirac was his host and personally gave him a guided tour of a French nuclear plant. Chirac offered to sell two reactors to Iraq.

WEAPONS-GRADE URANIUM

Included in the deal was enriched, weapons-grade uranium (93%), and France also agreed to train hundreds of Iraqi nuclear technicians and scientists who, today, comprise the basis of Iraq's nuclear know-how.

Chirac called Saddam "a friend," and later agreed to sell Iraq the latest Mirage fighter planes, a modern air defence system that the Americans zapped in the 1991 war, as well as surface-to-air missiles and electronic systems.

Saddam, in return, pledged to sell France all the oil it was likely to need.

It was the French-installed Osirak nuclear reactor that the Israelis bombed into oblivion in 1981 - and were condemned for its destruction. Israelis called it the "O-Chirac" reactor. Few at the time wondered why oil-rich Iraq needed nuclear reactors for power. We've since learned it intended to produce nuclear weapons.

French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing wasn't happy about the nuclear deal and later said it wasn't his doing, even though he must have known about it.

D'Estaing was angry that enriched weapons-grade uranium had been sold to Saddam, and tried to change the deal to 3%, uranium which was sufficient for Iraq's non-weapons needs. Saddam said no way, a deal was a deal.

When Chirac lost the French premier's job and ran for mayor of Paris in 1977, rumours abounded that Saddam helped fund his mayoralty run.

IRANIANS ANGERED

When Saddam seized control of Iraq and went to war against what he thought was a dispirited and weakened Iran, which had fallen to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranians felt Chirac was against them and scathingly referred to him as "Shah-Iraq."

In 1986, The New York Times quoted Chirac saying he was a "personal friend" of Saddam, and in 1987 The Manchester Guardian quoted Chirac saying he was "truly fascinated" by Saddam.

After the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Chirac denied he had anything to do with it, and blamed the sale on the French Industry minister who he said was close to d'Estaing. Chirac reversed earlier praise for the sale.

In 1987, the French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine published excerpts of a letter by Chirac to "my dear friend" Saddam that mentioned vague, future projects. Chirac confirmed the letter was genuine.

How much his past friendship with Saddam Hussein influences President Chirac's policies today is unknown, but the intensity of the relationship has lasted years.

It alarms the Israelis; it offends some European countries, especially in Eastern Europe; and we all know the outrage in America over what is seen as France's betrayal, but which may really be loyalty to Saddam.

Like2Talk talks nonsense, and I'm not even American, religious, Israeli or Jewish.....just a Canuck who agreed with the US stance

[takeo]

France warned about a "bloodbath" of civilians -- that never happened.

really? Many 10's of 1000's of civilians have died since the hostilities started in march, and it's still not finished.

They warned about an American defeat -- that never happened.

That's BS, chirac never said the US, the most powerfull nation in the world, would loose the war against tiny impoverished Iraq. But, now that we're to it, as unlikely as it may seem, the US STILL hasn't won the real war.

They warned about the Arab world's big backlash against America -- that never happened either, although the Arabs have always and will continue to hate America. The French warned about chaos resulting in other Arab countries -- that never happened.

Really? SA hasn't been as unstable for years, while the fundamentalists are on the rise everywhere in the arab world ever since. Bush said this war would harm the terrorists, quite on the contrary. Even the pentagon has admitted that the possibility of terrorist attacks against the US has increased since the war in Iraq.

So far, the only thing that has happened, in fact, is that 52 million Iraqis have been freed of the French-supported Saddam tyranny, while America continues to make progress against sporadic resistance. Once Saddam is captured or killed (and we all know that's just a matter of time), the rest of the resistance will stop altogether if Iran is dealt with properly.

i beg your pardon since when does iraq have 52 million inhabitants? Saddam was never more French-supported than he was America-supported, we supported him during his criminal invasion of Iran, as you guys did as well. chirac said before the latest war that saddam was a warcriminal, but that the US methods would result in a worse situation. He was very right.
"sporadic resistance", are you serious or are you joking?
You mean like it would be a matter of time before Bin Laden would have been caught? The resistance against us-occupation is growing every day, and the time that it only contained pro-Saddam fighters is finished, a very large share of the arab population of Iraq now supports the resistance in one way or another, even former anti-Saddam opposition, as do billions of people all over the world.

A democratically elected Iraqi government is on its way through American efforts, and economic recovery is also on its way, despite French efforts to sabotage both democracy and economic recovery in Iraq.

you are joking right? How did france sabotage democracy and economic recovery in Iraq? The US has sabotaged any possible economic recovery of Iraq for over a decade because of geo-political reasons, and now, even with the oil streaming, the us didn't succeed in the economic recovery of iraq. they made a mess, even die-hard fans of the invasion have admitted so. Only the even die-harder (don't know if such a word exists in english) fans such as you still believe in the propaganda coming from the white house.

So, I find the subject of this thread to be as far from the truth as Abu Chirac's statement "My American friends..."

you know what's really far from the truth? the US official reasons to invade Iraq, you can't argue with this one can you? . remember we had a discussion before the start of the war about WMD? You said i was a lier and that it was obvious iraq was full of WMD etc. Well, not once i heard an apology or an admission that you were wrong in following the white house lies.

France was right since the beginning about two major issues:
-the question of WMD should have been the responsability of the weapons inspectors
-a unilateral invasion would send the wrong message to both the international community and the iraqi people (but of course for you the iraqi people are nothing but barbaric arabs so this spoils your last argument for the invasion of iraq "the liberation of the iraqi people" )

[Mediocrates]

Just like you are revising history in order to debate the 'legitimacy' of Viet Nam, 30 years after US involvment ended, just like you are revising history 60+ years after the fact as to "Jewish" involvement in the Soviet Army, I suspect that Iraq will become your personal Emmanuel Goldstein. A permanent big ugly American you'll attempt to revise out of existance till the day you die.

[takeo]

Examining recently released government and corporate sources, researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies have uncovered new evidence that oil has long been the driving concern behind US-Iraqi relations. Key figures associated with the Bush Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, pressed Saddam Hussein during the mid '80's to approve the Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan.

In "Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus On Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein" the Institute for Policy Studies reveals that the diplomatic pressure from Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration happened during and despite Hussein's use of chemical weapons. Behind the scenes, these officials worked for two years attempting to secure the billion dollar pipeline scheme for the Bechtel corporation. The Bush/Cheney administration now eyes Bechtel as a primary contractor for the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure.

Bechtel's pipeline would have carried a million barrels of Iraqi crude oil a day through Jordan to the Red Sea port of Aqaba.

"The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction" said Jim Vallette, lead author of the report. "To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan Administration officials bent many rules to convince Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the US, from Iraq to Jordan."

Crude Vision reveals how the White House, through the Department of State and the National Security Council, pressured the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to approve financing for this deal. Reagan officials knew of numerous human rights violations by Saddam Hussein while they pursued US taxpayer support for the pipeline.

"In their own words, we now see that for Administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the United States when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not" said Vallette.

http://www.seen.org/pages/reports/crude.shtml

[takeo]

here you'll find a video and picture of rumsfeld and Saddam shaking hands as best friends in 1983, and an article depicting the extend of the excellent relations between the reagan-administration and Saddam houssein.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

[Mediocrates]

That is such tired desperate nonsense. Stalin and Hitler shook hands too. Chou en Lai and Nixon. blah blah blah

[takeo]

ok fine they shook hands, but please read the text...
it was in reply to the text lev posted on this thread...

[abu afak]

Originally posted by takeo
here you'll find a video and picture of rumsfeld and Saddam shaking hands as best friends in 1983, and an article depicting the extend of the excellent relations between the reagan-administration and Saddam houssein.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

1. http://www.zdf.de/ZDFheute/img/20/0,1369,2063444,00.jpg

2. http://www.zdf.de/ZDFheute/img/23/0,1369,2063447,00.jpg
AFP
Chirac und Saddam, 1976
(From http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/15/0,...018799,00.html )

And Saddam and Chirac weren't just caught in a photo together, they were Friends for 25 Years;
Jacques Having Sold Iraq it's Nukes which Israel thankfully later took out.

[Like2Talk]

Some short about the reactions to part #1

NewsGuy : another nuts (I rate less dangerous than '9 mm exterminator' Gilgamesh but you same level as ibrodsky: a poor joker
I though everyone knows there are around 27M people - yes 'people', not 'primitives' - in Iraq, and as for France you're just pathetic)

Kev : this article is not by me

takeo : you're incredebly different, I'm impressed. If I may make a suggestion I think we should concentrate on the article itself, (with 3025 posts rectifying errors on this forum I'm suprised some other "old posters" are so pathetic). You are indeed very patient.

One remark : as far as I know, victim count in irak is between 7000 and 11000. Not ten of thousands. Sorry I have no sources.



I go on with the article. I forgot to give you the date it was published : Friday, Nov. 7, 2003

In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration got into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were so mistaken. But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the Administration Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It Right." To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck type of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by partisan, factional enmity. But to ask why the French were right is to put the matter in a more positive, constructive vein. And the question has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter of assigning historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary rethinking of the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in a fitful, truculent mood, has in any event already begun, with its recent plea for help from the United Nations and other countries, France included, and its stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in charge of security.

Hold on. Were the French really right? After all, Iraq is not a finished matter. What looks like a mess today may yet get sorted out. Most supporters of the war continue to believe it was justified, despite the problems it has caused. Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that the French, and in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain analytical purchase on the situation that the Bush administration lacked.

The French made three basic claims -- all countered, in varying degrees of intensity, by the administration. The first was that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent, and that's borne out by all available evidence, not least the latest report by Bush-appointed arms inspector David Kay, in which he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had been found. The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process -- with the Iraqi population very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by various fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a majority of Iraqis would like the United States to leave. And third, the French correctly predicted that the Muslim world would perceive a U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United Nations as illegitimate -- and thus would incite even greater anger toward America.

"A war in Iraq could trigger more frustration, bitterness, in the Arab world and beyond, in the Muslim world," Jean-David Levitte, French ambassador to the U.S., warned in remarks on February 7 at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. Touche. "Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," an administration-appointed panel, headed by a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Edward Djerejian, recently reported on post-invasion attitudes in the Muslim world.

[TDidier]

Originally posted by abu afak
1. http://www.zdf.de/ZDFheute/img/20/0,1369,2063444,00.jpg

2. http://www.zdf.de/ZDFheute/img/23/0,1369,2063447,00.jpg
AFP
Chirac und Saddam, 1976
(From http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/15/0,...018799,00.html )

And Saddam and Chirac weren't just caught in a photo together, they were Friends for 25 Years;
Jacques Having Sold Iraq it's Nukes which Israel thankfully later took out.

There's many much jokes in France about Chirac's "30-years-best-friends". Most part of them are completly forgoten by our "prez"...

But Abu, read back what Takeo writed and you will see that it is nothing else but the exemple of how childich are your point about Chirac's friendship with another state dirigeant...

And if you want to show close relation between those two guys with photo, please choose some photo more expresives: at beach, on a sofa, cooking in a kitchen, in a bed... Or lovely shaking hands with huge smile like SHussein and DRumsfeld when they were in love...

[Mediocrates]

It's still a very silly point to make and one you make incessantly. Are you a silly person?

I've met Bruce Cutler (John Gottis' lawyer), Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein), what do you make of that?

Photographs? Didn't the Queen of England shake Idi Amin's hand?

[takeo]

It's still a very silly point to make and one you make incessantly. Are you a silly person?

it's a very valid point to make and one that needs to be rectified soon. It's about the future of an entire country and the mistakes being made by another one, it's about the whole French-bashing in the us (to which you participated) wich, if one looks at it now, was very shamefull and unbased. Most of all it's about the dishonesty of some people who refuse to admit that they were wrong, even if all facts are against them.

I've met Bruce Cutler (John Gottis' lawyer), Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein), what do you make of that?

are you a celebrity?
the most famous people i ever met were the pope and Boris Yeltsin... i also once saw Margaret Tatcher on a reception in Paris...

Photographs? Didn't the Queen of England shake Idi Amin's hand?

yes, i know it doesn't proove anything, but the relations between the reagan-administration and Saddam went much further than an occasional handshake (see above). So don't blame chirac before looking in the mirror...

[takeo]

NewsGuy : another nuts (I rate less dangerous than '9 mm exterminator' Gilgamesh but you same level as ibrodsky: a poor joker

not really nuts just very radical rightwing. And i'm afraid he isn't joking at all, i hope those guys will never ever influence power more than they already so in Israel and the US...

I though everyone knows there are around 27M people - yes 'people', not 'primitives' - in Iraq, and as for France you're just pathetic)

indeed, his comments about france are just ignorant and stupid.

takeo : you're incredebly different, I'm impressed. If I may make a suggestion I think we should concentrate on the article itself, (with 3025 posts rectifying errors on this forum I'm suprised some other "old posters" are so pathetic). You are indeed very patient

ok you're right. sometimes i think it's a challenge to participate to groups or forums where most people think very different, and it's good for my English language skills and interesting so why not. If I get mad i just don't react, in real life i wouldn't be so patient. Your posts are very good too, you would be a great help! Continuez le bon travail.

One remark : as far as I know, victim count in irak is between 7000 and 11000. Not ten of thousands. Sorry I have no sources.

I read a few times there were much more.

There's many much jokes in France about Chirac's "30-years-best-friends". Most part of them are completly forgoten by our "prez"...

Chirac is a hypocrite and , but not near as hypocrite or as Bush or Rumsfeld.

But Abu, read back what Takeo writed and you will see that it is nothing else but the exemple of how childich are your point about Chirac's friendship with another state dirigeant...

they just ignore what doesn't fit in their tiny worldview

And if you want to show close relation between those two guys with photo, please choose some photo more expresives: at beach, on a sofa, cooking in a kitchen, in a bed... Or lovely shaking hands with huge smile like SHussein and DRumsfeld when they were in love...

sorry but i would rather not want to see!