A Tip on Iraq From Those Who Walked That
Road: The French paid dearly for imperial and military hubris. Listen up, U.S.
February 25, 2003
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Robert Scheer:
The alliances on "Survivor" have more stability and logic
than those currently held by the United States. We need
a weekly two-hour special to keep us in the know.
Did we buy off Turkey yet? Hey, what's $15 billion for
a mercenary in need? And is Syria, the sworn enemy of
our enemy, Saddam Hussein, our new friend?
Oh, and if Pakistan is the dictatorship that backed the
Taliban, why are we covering our ears and humming the
theme to "Friends" whenever anyone talks about its
nukes and scary collaboration with North Korea?
We suddenly like those U.S. flag-burners in Tehran --
possessors of a nuclear weapons program Hussein can
only dream of -- so much that we have given their boys
in the Northern Alliance the keys to Kabul, and now we
might open the back door for them to take over Shiite
southern Iraq.
On the other hand, old ally Germany and new ally
Russia have both been downgraded to a status below
lap dog Bulgaria for daring to suggest that Emperor
Bush is without clothes; while uppity China is getting a
reprieve because, as our second-largest trading partner,
it keeps Wal-Mart stocked with patriotic animatronic
toys. If we weren't worried about burning the waffles,
we'd probably have lobbed a few cruise missiles into
antiwar Belgium by now.
Nutty Pyongyang is receiving a mix of strained patience
and physical restraints, while we apparently think
another round of electroshock therapy is the cure for
troubled Iraq.
And while we like Iraq's Kurds and Shiites now, they'd
best be advised to cash in before the next immunity
challenge, when they could be on the short end of the
stick of whatever malleable Iraqi general we handpick to run our new oil fields.
Is all this shuffling of friends and foes just realpolitik, similar to how we ignore the
mayhem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an inconvenient sideshow? Like when
President Reagan was cutting secret arms deals with Tehran's fundamentalists,
even as he sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1984 to reaffirm our support for
Iraq after the U.N. documented its use of poison gas on Iranian troops?
Despite this confusing picture then and now, thanks to our enlightened talk-show
hosts we all know that there is one nation of pure evil, one nasty country
threatening to undermine the world's security with its lies, double-dealing and
stubborn defiance, one state that Earth would simply be better off without.
We're talking, of course, about France. Brie eaters. Surly waiters. WWII
collaborators. And now, cowardly traitors in the crusade against the New Hitler.
This idiocy is based on a highly selective historical memory, including the fact that
the U.S. refused to enter the war against Hitler until after France fell. It also keeps
us from being able to listen to a nation that has already been down the road we are
traveling.
Imperialism has always been pitched at home as a win-win way to help the world's
stricken peoples while helping oneself, and in Paris it was no different. France's
colonial wars were waged under the rival banners of Catholicism and the French
Revolution; the goal was to civilize the natives. A million Frenchmen gave up the
joys of life at the center of Europe to colonize Algeria alone, building schools,
churches, hospitals and civic bureaucracies.
Ultimately, however, the price of France's hubris was writ large in the blood of its
sons and daughters over painful decades, from the fall of Dien Bien Phu to the
Battle of Algiers, from the student protests of '68 to the bombs that terrorized
Paris.
One of the fallen was a French soldier-cum-journalist named Bernard Fall. He died
when he stepped on a Viet Cong land mine while accompanying a U.S. patrol, but
not before he had written compellingly about the inevitable stench of imperial
ambition turning rancid. But let's let Colin Powell explain.
"I recently read Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, 'Street Without Joy,' " the
secretary of State and Vietnam vet wrote in his 1995 autobiography. "Fall makes
painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten
ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President
Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book,
they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately
started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam."
Many believe that the U.S. is simply incapable of imperialism or even of being
wrong, that we are the divinely designated agent of democracy, that gleaming City
on the Hill so frequently mentioned by Reagan. But the lesson of France is that
merely riding in under the banner of liberty is no guarantee that you or those you
"liberate" won't regret you ever left home.
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