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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6681)	2/8/2003 6:00:26 PM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 25898

The Rat That Roared Jacques Chirac Though I don't speak French well , this fellow comes across as phony as the humongous nose of "Cyrano de BergeChirac"...what a pompous , staging , farcical marionette he is . God , and I thought our politicians were pretty bad sometimes...makes one extremely glad to live in America .<g> The french are going to get a well~deserved shafting when the desert sands settle afterwords , is my guess.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6681)	2/8/2003 9:01:58 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 25898

Excellent article. Excellent.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6681)	2/9/2003 3:13:00 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 25898

Thanks for posting that article! Hitchens indeed brings up some interesting points and questions that we in the US need to check out further. I think all of us need to understand further what French and German companies have sold what and for what purpose to Iraq in the WMD department. Mr. Hitchens asks some of these questions: However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analyzed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, have unctuously said that "force is always the last resort." Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try and rescue the client-regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who currently treat the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbor after protesting the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. We are all aware of the fact that French companies and the French state are owed immense sums of money by Saddam Hussein. We all very much hope that no private gifts to any French political figures have been made by the Iraqi Baath Party, even though such scruple on either side would be anomalous to say the very least. Is it possible that there is any more to it than that? The future government in Baghdad may very well not consider itself responsible for paying Saddam's debts. Does this alone condition the Chirac response to a fin de régime in Iraq? Alas, no. Recent days brought tidings of an official invitation to Paris, for Robert Mugabe. The President-for-life of Zimbabwe may have many charms, but spare cash is not among them. His treasury is as empty as the stomachs of his people. No, when the plumed parade brings Mugabe up the Champs Elysees, the only satisfaction for Mr. Chirac will be the sound of a petty slap in the face to Tony Blair, who has recently tried to abridge Mugabe's freedom to travel. Thus we are forced to think that French diplomacy, as well as being for sale or for hire, is chiefly preoccupied with extracting advantage and prestige from the difficulties of its allies.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (6681)	2/9/2003 7:26:30 AM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

" The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq " (cont'd III) The Romantic These days, Christopher Hitchens sounds anything but unhappy. His militant support, first for the war with Al Qaeda and now for a war in Iraq, has led him to break quite publicly with former comrades. He has vacated the column he wrote in The Nation for the past 20 years and has said harsh things about the ''masochists'' of the anti-American left. Hitchens's apostasy has generated nearly as much attention on the left as the war itself, but over a three-hour lunch in Washington, his position struck me as more judicious than its print version. Hitchens agrees with the ''decent skepticism'' of liberals who distrust the administration's motives, but he has decided that hawks like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz aim to use a democratic Iraq to end the regional dominance of Saudi Arabia. If this is the hidden agenda, Hitchens wants to force it into the open. He compares Saddam's Iraq with Ceausescu's Romania in 1989: it's going to implode anyway, and America should have a hand in the process. In 1991, Hitchens was too suspicious of American motives to support the first gulf war -- a hangover, he says, from his days as a revolutionary socialist -- but on a visit to northern Iraq at the end of the war, he rode in a jeep with Kurdish fighters he admired who had taped pictures of the first George Bush to their windshield. It was a minor revelation. ''I'm not ashamed of my critique of the gulf war,'' he says, ''but I'm annoyed by how limited it was.'' Since then, Hitchens has steadily warmed to American power exercised on behalf of democracy. When I suggested that since Sept. 11 he has gone back to the 18th-century, when the struggle between the secular liberal Enlightenment and religious dark-age tyranny created the modern world, Hitchens readily agreed. ''After the dust settles, the only revolution left standing is the American one,'' he said. ''Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world. There's almost no country where adopting the Americans wouldn't be the most radical thing they could do. I've always been a Paine-ite.'' British pamphleteer for the American revolution -- Hitchens has updated the role for Iraq. His relish for war with radical Islamists and tyrants (''You want to be a martyr? I'm here to help'') sounds like the bulldog pugnacity of a British naval officer's son, which he is. It also suggests a deep desire, and a romantic one, to join a revolution -- even if it's admittedly a ''revolution from above.'' ''I feel much more like I used to in the 60's,'' he says, ''working with revolutionaries. That's what I'm doing; I'm helping a very desperate underground. That reminds me of my better days quite poignantly.'' Hitchens has plans to drink Champagne with comrades in Baghdad around Valentine's Day. The Skeptic ''Revolution from above'' was Trotsky's mocking phrase for Stalin's use of the Communist Party to collectivize the Soviet Union. It implies coercion toward a notion of the good. David Rieff, whose book ''Slaughterhouse'' condemned the failure of Western powers to intervene in Bosnia, compares revolution from above to Plato's idea of ruling Guardians. What they share, says Rieff, is a desire to pursue utopian ends by undemocratic means. ''I always thought there was more in common between Human Rights Watch and the Bush administration than either would be comfortable thinking, because they both are revolutionaries -- in my view, quite dangerous radicals. They believe that virtue can be imposed by force of law and force of arms. Christopher has the same view with his sense that a democratic alternative can be imposed by force of arms in the Middle East.'' Unlike Hitchens, an Englishman who ''liked the United States enough to have concluded when I was about 16 that I'd been born in the wrong country,'' Rieff is an American who grew up with a European education, traveled the world as a teenager and always looked askance at the notion of America as either savior or Satan. As an empire, America is neither better nor worse than other empires -- but to expect it to behave like Amnesty International is foolish. The difference between Bosnia and Iraq, Rieff says, is the difference between supporting democracy and imposing it. The former was a moral imperative as well as a strategic one; the latter is hubris. With Iraq, this hubris is leading to ''a hideous mistake.'' ''I accept everything that the Bush administration says about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein,'' Rieff says, ''but I do think it's a revolution too far.'' more...