I think you'll like this:
The French Were Right
By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003
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.
Still seething over the French prewar position on Iraq, administration officials are
hardly of a mind to bestow awards on the French for prescience. The Democrats,
many of whom supported the war, would have no political gain in citing the
unpopular French as role models for their thinking, even if the statements now
made by the party's leaders in Congress and its presidential candidates so closely
resemble prewar French comments. ("The war was an unnecessary war," retired
Gen. Wesley Clark pronounced, a la Chirac, on October 9.)
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