Re: ...now that Sharky has been appointed it's time for him to get into line with Angela & Co to do his bit for the Zionist cause.
Indeed... Somehow, Nicolas Sarkozy is but the right-wing avatar of the defunct Guy Mollet. Replace Egypt with Iran, the Suez crisis with Iranian nukes, Nasser with Ahmadinejad, the US with China, and Mollet's Protestantism with Sarkozy's crypto-Judaism and you get the parallel:
Suez
Although Mollet wanted to concentrate on domestic issues, he found himself confronted with a major foreign policy issue, the Suez Crisis, when the President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalised the Suez Canal.
As the crisis escalated, previously secret British cabinet papers show that in September 1956 the Anglophile Mollet requested to merge France and the United Kingdom and again, two weeks later, for France to join the Commonwealth of Nations. Along with the crisis, the French economy was in a mess and the United Kingdom was seen as a social and economic role model in Paris. Both requests were turned down by the British prime minister Anthony Eden, and a year later France signed the Treaty of Rome with Germany and the other founding nations of the Common market.
Eden feared that Nasser intended to cut off oil supplies to Europe. In October 1956 Mollet, Eden and the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, met in secret and agreed to make a joint attack on Egypt. The Israelis invaded Egypt, and British and French troops occupied the Suez Canal area. But the invasion met with unexpected opposition from the United States, and France and the United Kingdom were forced into a humiliating backdown. Eden resigned, but Mollet survived the crisis, despite fierce criticism from the left.
Algeria
Like the rest of the French left, Mollet opposed French colonialism in Africa, and had supported Mendès-France's efforts in office to withdraw from Tunisia and Morocco. Mollet's government was left with the issue of Algeria, where the presence of a million French settlers made a simple withdrawal politically impossible (see also Algerian War of Independence).
Mollet's policy was to negotiate with the FLN liberation front. Once in office, however, he changed his mind and argued that the FLN insurgents must be defeated before negotiations could begin. He poured French troops into Algeria, where they conducted a campaign of counter-terrorism including torture, in particular during the Battle of Algiers which took place from January to October 1957. This was too much for most French, and Mollet's government collapsed in June 1957 on the issue of taxation to pay for the Algerian War.
[...]
en.wikipedia.org
My current read:
Suez
- Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East
AUTHOR: Keith Kyle
ibtauris.com |
