To: TigerPaw who wrote (390347 ) 4/12/2003 6:28:15 AM From: sun-tzu Read Replies (3) | Respond to "That kind of talk unnerves some people, if only because the present arrangements suit them quite nicely. Bookending the liberation of Baghdad are two summits -- Bush and Blair in Belfast on Monday, Chirac and Schroeder and Putin in Moscow on Friday. It's nice to have the choices put so plainly: on the one hand, the Coalition of the Willing; on the other, the Coalition of the Willing To Go On Selling Saddam Nuclear Reactors In Exchange For Oil Concessions For Another Decade Or Three No Matter How Many People He Kills. The French mock the "coalition of the willing" as "les Anglo-Saxons," and if that's the best insult they can come up with I'll take it. Nothing new about this: in Eastern Europe in the Eighties, Thatcher and Reagan were the heroes, not Mitterrand and Schmidt. Liberated peoples are rarely grateful to those who found it more convenient to keep them in prison. "Anglo-Saxon" may be a sneer in France and Belgium, not in Eastern Europe. "The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter." "nationalpost.com
