The French

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

You two need to get a room…

Anyway, getting back to the topic, which is the French, meaning the French and their relationship with good old Uncle Sam.

Yes, they helped us out way, way back in the day. Out of the goodness of their own hearts, for liberty, fraternity, equality, and blah, blah, blah- please. They did it to weaken the Limies, and not to soon after started giving us new upstarts grief.

If Pierre wants to lecture us about living well- food, wine, and chasing skirts, fine, we’ll listen. But about the big issues of the day, they have nothing to say.

Militarily- Let’s see- since the Krauts gave them their really big Beatdown in 1871, what have they done?

WWI- Criminally incompetent French ( and British)leadership wasted the lives of well over a million brave French soldiers. The Germans bested them just about every battle, and if it weren’t for the infusion of American manpower and material, they were done. Period.

What lessons did they apply from the Great War and perfect over the next twenty years to perpare for the Blitzkrieg? Well, they built the Maginot Line, which of course prevented the Krauts from doing what they did in 1914. Wait a minute, the Huns took all of six weeks to defeat Europe’s largest army with the most tanks, and British help. Brillance.

Then what did the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen do? Aside from a few commies who were mostly fighting amongst themselves, they made it very easy for the Huns, so much so that it was by far the best place for your average Fritz to spend the war. I think they call it collaboration. Incidentally, many a Frog was more than happy to help the Naziis round up the Jews and take them somewhere east.

The French, being so smart and all, know all of this, so much so that a poll of Frogs taken not so long ago showed that they believe the Resistance, not all of those GI’s, Kanooks, and Limies and all of their artillery, tanks, trucks, planes, and mountains of other things, liberated Froggyville.

BTW, it was an ocean of Soviet blood and a mountain range of US production delivered to Europe that vanquished the Third Reich.

So then realizing that an Iron Curtain was descending across Europe and that Ivan the Bear didn’t want to play nice, we formed NATO and the Frogs joined- but not for long. Being French, they had to go their own way They probably figured that since the Krauts beat them down so easily they would wear down the Ivans before they got to the Rhine. So the Frogs thought is was okay to get all mouthy again, and pull some stunts in the colonies.

Now kids, if you want to read about total, absolute and complete military incompetence, google up Dien Bien Phu. If you want to read about torture, google up the French-Algerian War.

So then, what kind of good advice can the Frogs give us? We lost, so don’t try. To which Uncle Sam would say, thanks for the advice, but your French, of course you did.

For that French guy to imply that it was primarily B41 that was supporting Saddam all of these years speaks well, extremely well, of the French education system. So one Chirac, somewhere high up there in the French government, hasn’t been courting him since the seventies. The French didn’t sell them a reactor, for nothing but peaceful purposes we can 110% sure. The French haven’t been bribing Iraq for oil consessions and to develop their oil fields. They haven’t been selling them military equipment. They haven’t been central in the Oil for Bribes Scandal? About how many millions of francs, Euros, whatever did Saddam owe the Frogs? Tens of billions?

Who knows what the average Frenchman thinks about the US of A. Who cares what the insular, vane, and corrupt Froggie political elite ‘knows’?

Like I said before, if a Frenchman wants to talk about living well, I’m all ears. If a Frog wants to lecture me about foreign policy or economics or something really big, well, Nein Danke!

Can one of gentlemen tell me what it’s like to be part of a nation that has been on the slide for what, at least 150 years?

Now, is the good ole U S of A perfect? Of course not, but we are a lot less imperfect I dare say than any of our detractors would be as by far the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

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Schrauper:

Nice post!

103

Speaking of French lectures on foreign policy, let’s go back to the Ivory Coast for a moment. The French should really take the log out of their own eye before trying to point out any specks of dust in ours…

Apparently there are charges that French troops were firing indiscriminately into a group of civilians in Ivory Coast.

Here is part one of the video evidence:

http://radioci.embaci.com/englishdownload/frenchsoldiershootingcivilians1.mpg

Here is part two:

I can’t find anything in the MSM about this, although there are some denials from France of other charges: beheading protestors in Ivory Coast:

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L21570329.htm

Here is a take on the videos:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/003133.php

Excerpt:

I’ve looked through both videos several times now, and it appears that the shooting in part I was warning fire. People hit the ground but then immediately got up and continued protesting. If anyone had been hit, they seemed pretty unconcerned. The few scenes showing bullet wounds appear rather minor, perhaps the result of ricochets on the warning shots.

The second video is the real thing. People hit the ground and don’t get back up, and it’s apparent that wounds caused by this fire are no accident. Neither video gives much context to the shooting, though. It still isn’t clear that the French weren’t provoked, only that the video doesn’t show any provocation.

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The French are an absolute disgrace. I wish all Americans would do their part and boycott everything that is French! The French are spineless COWARDS. Wouldn’t it be nice if they needed the USA’s help and we turned our backs on them! I will not forget that the French do not want our soliders bodies in Normandy. How quickly they forget we saved their asses in WWII. FUCK FRANCE!!!

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Much more info on the French massacre of civilians in Ivory Coast here:

http://www.freewillblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/4754/

Scroll down to the bottom for pictures.

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[quote]bandgeek wrote:
An 18th century French general asked an 18th century English general why the Brits always wore red coats into battle. “Well,” said the Brit, “it is so that if the platoon leader is shot, the blood will not show and cause panic among the troops.” The Frenchman was most impressed and decided to give the idea a try in his own country. And so, to this day, the French army always goes into battle wearing brown pants.[/quote]

took me a little while to get it, but when i did…whoohoo!

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Speechless at some of the above…

Some of the posts make sense. Some of them are just worrying.

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Some very excellent points here:

http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2004/11/outrageous-intolerable-incitement.html

[Follow link above to access post with internal links]

Outrageous Intolerable Incitement: the Ivory Coast and France, France and America

In an interview with France Inter radio last Sunday, French Defense Minister Mich?le Alliot-Marie dismissed as ?outrageous? reports that French troops had ?decapitated? Ivorian protestors in Abidjan. ?The outrageousness of the terms employed strips them of all credibility,? she said. ?Such remarks consist of disinformation,? she added. More specifically, Mme. Alliot-Marie was responding to Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo, who, while noting that he had not himself visited the Abidjan hospital where the headless corpses of protesters are supposed to have been held, said that on the basis of the testimony of ?several persons? who had done so ?one could consider the reports as true?. The original report of decapitations came from the Archbishop of Abidjan Bernard Agr?, who, interviewed on the French-language service of Radio Vatican, said: ?I?ve just come from the hospitals. It?s intolerable: these young people decapitated by the French Army, these bodies lying on the ground.? So if there is a campaign of disinformation, the Archbishop is apparently in on it and Radio Vatican has been one of its conduits. In her interview with France Inter, Mme. Alliot-Marie also noted that the ?climate of hatred? toward the French in Ivory Coast was ?extremely disturbing? and added that ?the racist remarks, the xenophobic remarks that we have heard from Ivorian leaders are intolerable,? thus implying that the Ivorian leadership was conducting a campaign of incitement. (The charge that Ivorian media were employing ?hate speech? to incite hostility to the French had already been made by French authorities to the UN bureaucracy, which dutifully adopted the charge as its own and issued a warning to the Ivorian authorities.) Calling on President Gbagbo to ?take the measure of his responsibilities,? Mme. Alliot-Marie concluded that his remarks on the allegedly decapitated corpses belonged ?in the register of the manipulation of the mobs in Abidjan in the absence of any free and independent press? ? thus, in effect, personally accusing President Gbagbo of incitement. In this connection, it is worth noting that President Gbagbo?s remarks were made not on Ivorian airwaves, but rather in an Internet forum hosted by the prominent French news weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and in response to a question from a visitor who asked him directly what he thought of the Archbishop?s charge. According to the Nouvel Observateur?s website, nouvelobs.com, more than 2500 questions were posed to Mr. Gbagbo.

Now, of course, the charge that French troops decapitated Ivorian protestors is indeed highly implausible. Unlike in the case of certain Islamic forces, there is no notable French tradition of beheading prisoners of war, much less of engaging in decapitations in the field, such as are seemingly implied by the charges being leveled in connection with the Ivorian protestors. More to the point, why should the French troops have decapitated protestors? What would be the purpose of engaging in gratuitous hands-on savagery, when the ?normal? use of deadly force at a relatively safe distance will do the job? The context for the beheading charges is a confrontation that took place on November 9 between Ivorian protestors and French troops having taken up heavily armed positions in front of the Hotel Ivoire, not far from Laurent Gbagbo?s Presidential residence. The French forces are accused of having fired into the crowd. Depending on sources, anywhere from 7 to upwards of 60 Ivorians are said to have been killed in the incident, with many more wounded. Not only is this allegation in itself plausible, but a spokesperson for the French army admitted in an November 14 interview with the Swiss television channel TSR that it is true. Here is a link to the TSR interview (hat tip Seewen commenting on the Free Will Blog). Colonel G?rard Dubois justified these actions as ?legitimate self-defense? in response to fire coming from pro-Gbagbo ?Young Patriot? militia members allegedly using the crowd as cover. There is, moreover, video apparently depicting the incident (among other things) available on the Free Will Blog here. I should say that I have not myself watched the entire video. The parts I have seen are already sufficiently grisly and heart-rending. Aaron writing on the Free Will Blog notes that the footage does indeed include images of headless corpses. I will take his word for it. Given this footage and given the testimony of the Archbishop of Abidjan, who under ordinary circumstances would surely be considered a reliable witness in the matter, it would seem that there are, then, such corpses. I will not venture to speculate here on how they got that way.

The Hotel Ivoire incident has attracted much comment in the blogosphere. Probably the most extensive coverage and discussion are provided on Free Will (hat tip Instapundit). By contrast, the traditional mainstream media have largely ignored it. Bloggers have pointed out the hypocrisy. It does not require a very elaborate demonstration to be able to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if it were not the French, but rather the American military that was caught on videotape firing into a crowd of civilians, it would be all over the airwaves 24/7.

Whether it was ?legitimate? for the French troops to have opened fire on the crowd, as the French Army spokesperson suggests, does not only depend on whether they had themselves come under fire from militants. It also depends on whether they had any business being in Abidjan in the first place and, more generally, on whether the increasingly aggressive action taken by the French forces in the Ivory Coast, including the November 6 destruction of much of the Ivorian air force, is compatible with their specific mandate under the relevant UN Security Council resolutions and with the basic principles of international law as laid out in the UN Charter. Depaul University law professor Jeremy Levitt, writing in the November 21 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, concludes that the French escalation of its military involvement on November 6 was illegal and, in effect, transformed erstwhile French peace-keeping forces into a party to war with the Ivory Coast.

Finally, let us suppose, for sake of argument, that President Gbagbo?s and Archbishop Agr??s remarks concerning the headless corpses are part of a campaign of incitement against the French. In any case, their seeming attribution of responsibility for beheadings to the deliberate actions of French forces appears entirely unfounded. Well, as I have discussed at length here, on October 6 the publicly-funded Franco-German television channel Arte ran a report in which American troops were repeatedly accused of having beheaded Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War: a report indeed that creates the impression that this must have been a relatively normal occurence. Is this not ?outrageous?, ?intolerable? incitement? Should not the French government and the German government ?take the measure of their responsibilities? in the matter? Should not the UN Secretariat notify them that they should cease using public airwaves to disseminate such anti-American ?hate speech??

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In addition to French adventures in Africa, it is necessary to note their active malfeasance with respect to Iraq:

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/12/nimitz-in-un-service-1998-november.html

Thursday, December 02, 2004
The Nimitz in UN Service: 1998

The November 1998 issue of Proceedings, the journal of the US Naval Institute is no longer online. However I discovered a cached copy on my hard disk in the process of cleaning it out. One of the articles it contained was the third part of a series of six entitled Five Fleets: Around the World with the Nimitz by Lieutenant Commander William R. Bray, U.S.N. The events of that long-ago blockade on Iraq before the War on Terror took on a fascinating aspect in retrospect. Bray describes how the Nimitz was taking part in a UN sponsored mission to contain Saddam Hussein. One of its tasks was to support a U-2 flight over Iraq that Saddam had threatened to shoot down. The U-2 was an American aircraft assigned to a United Nations mission. What Bray described next was how the French tracked the Nimitz task force almost certainly on behalf of Saddam.

[Begin Proceedings excerpt]  Faces in the war room were long, pale, and tired, yet an intensity hung in the air as each staff officer offered final thoughts on the day's events and what to expect the following day when a United Nations-sponsored U-2 reconnaissance plane would fly into denied Iraqi air space for the first time since Saddam Hussein explicitly threatened to shoot it down. ...six-and-a-half years after the Gulf War, the United States is ensnared in multilateral confusions, unable to force the critical denouement that would lay bare Saddam's elaborate program of deception in dodging U.N. weapons inspections. ...

On 16 October, Richard Butler, the new chairman of the U.N. Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) charged with carrying out weapons inspections in Iraq, delivered his six-month review on Iraqi compliance and progress toward sanctions relief to the Security Council in New York. ... Ambassador Hamdoon, on instruction from Baghdad, delivered a letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on 29 October, detailing conditions for future Iraqi cooperation with UNSCOM. Foremost on the list was a demand for U.S. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq by 6 November and for the United Nations to immediately cease using the U.S. U-2 for monitoring missions over Iraq. On the very same day, Iraq began barring U.S. inspectors from inspection sites. Baghdad clearly was trying to isolate the United States from the other members of the Security Council. It seemed incredible to most in the United Nations that a vanquished aggressor state such as Iraq would so boldly dictate the terms of its own chastisement and assume such an affront would hasten its reentry into the family of nations after seven years of isolation. ...

Militarily, the crisis was centering around Iraq's aversion to the UNSCOM-chartered U-2 flight, which had evolved from an implicit to an explicit threat to shoot down the plane if it flew into Iraqi territory. The UNSCOM U-2 flew approximately four missions per month, and the first flight scheduled for November had slid to the 10th, thus allowing the seriousness of the Iraqi threat to be properly ascertained and a response to any aggression thoroughly planned and agreed upon. ... Inside the skin of the ship, however, intelligence personnel and the aviators they support were working furiously, planning detailed missions against Iraqi targets tasked to be struck if the 10 November U-2 was fired upon. ...

On 3 November, one of the Nimitz's escorts reported being overflown by a plane bearing similar characteristics to the French built Atlantique, a twin-propeller engine aircraft used for maritime surveillance and antisubmarine warfare. Task Force 50 assets were unable to positively identify the aircraft, although it appeared the plane tracked back to the west, either to Saudi Arabia or Qatar, following its mission. No Gulf country has the Atlantique. On 9 November, an Atlantique-type aircraft again flew a maritime patrol profile in the northern and central Arabian Gulf, even dropping a passive acoustic listening device near a U.S. submarine operating on the surface. This time the aircraft was tracked back to Doha, Qatar. It was later learned that two French Atlantiques, deployed to Djibouti on the Red Sea, had flown to Qatar on 29 October for a bilateral training mission. The French made no excuses for their activity, but it seemed strange that they should use a bilateral training exercise to fly maritime surveillance patrol against U.S. ships during a period of heightened tension.

Likewise, in early November, the French frigate Jean de Vienne mysteriously deviated from her published schedule, which called for port visits outside the Gulf, and instead loitered close to U.S. ships in the northern Arabian Gulf until the crisis abated. The Jean de Vienne never actually obstructed U.S. operations, but her presence and odd behavior were highly suspect and a public statement from the French mission in Kuwait that the Jean de Vienne was operating in close coordination with her coalition partners had a disingenuous ring to it.

It would be naive to assume that the French, with their close and sympathetic ties to Iraq, are not collecting intelligence against their coalition partners. What is not known is how much of this information finds its way to Baghdad. One thing is certain, however. The French are not trusted members of the coalition and their presence must serve some grand political objective in Paris that involves having it both ways--appearing the concerned contributor to a collective-security arrangement while at the same time working to undermine that arrangement's very raison d'?tre. That, as I'm sure Joseph Conrad's Martin Decoud would agree, is the practical approach. [End Proceedings excerpt]

The Russians were ready to play their part. While the movements of the Nimitz and the rest of the Fleet were being reported by French warships, the Kremlin induced Saddam to retreat ever so slightly from the brink, but not all the way, leaving the Iraqi dictator with a net gain. They played the hero to the American heel. More from LCDR Bray:

[Begin Proceedings excerpt] As the Nimitz operated in the northern Arabian Gulf on the morning of 19 November, Russia's Foreign Minister, the crafty former KGB spymaster and accomplished Arabist Yevgeny Primakov, was on his way from Moscow to Geneva to discuss with his U.S., British, and French counterparts a yet-to-be revealed eleventh-hour way out of the crisis. Primakov had just hosted and cut a deal with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, still Baghdad's lead man on all foreign policy concerns. Aziz, who swaggers into the hallowed corridors of the United Nations with so much panache one wonders if he doesn't realize he's the head statesman of a first-rate thugocracy, had just finished stops in New York and Paris and was in North Africa when beckoned to the Kremlin. There the Russians promised Aziz they would work harder in the Security Council to get sanctions lifted, as long as Iraq immediately allowed all UNSCOM inspectors to return to work and complied with all existing resolutions. Baghdad accepted, and on 21 November the inspectors returned to Iraq, temporarily defusing the crisis. [End Proceedings excerpt]

The United States was being played like a fiddle, its huge fleet and aerial assets led in circles in the sham blockade that we now know was set up by ‘friends’ on the Security Council who were running a covert rearmament effort called the Oil-for-Food Programme. History may show that Oil-For-Food; the corrupt regime of UN inspections, the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation industry – and much else – were all of a piece. Future generations will be astonished, not at how terrible that September day in New York was, but at how lightly the US got off for the folly of the 1990s, escaping not so much through vigilance as sheer good fortune.

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If you would like to read about the duplicity of the french and in particular of Chirac I recommend:

Trachery by Bill Gertz: How are friends and allies secretly arm our foes.

Pretty well laid out and scandalous from my perspective.

111

Do we still have the receipt for the Statue of Liberty? Let’s return that hunk of crap and get back to those Freedom Fries!

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[quote]ZEB wrote:
(For more of the adventures of vrooms ultra liberal US bashing please stay tuned!)[/quote]

there is only a small number of people who consistently post logical, thoughtful points-of-view on these forums, IMHO vroom is one of them. I’ve never read any US-bashing; everything he has posted suggests his political leanings as being centre-left, not extreme left-wing as you suggest Zeb.
From what I can surmise - a ‘liberal’ to you is someone who disagrees with you and an ‘ultra-liberal’ is someone who disagrees with you, and wins the argument every time.

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[quote]T-chick wrote:

From what I can surmise - a ‘liberal’ to you is someone who disagrees with you and an ‘ultra-liberal’ is someone who disagrees with you, and wins the argument every time.[/quote]

HAHAHA, that one’s an instant classic! Damn, T-chick, you sure have figured ol’ zebbie out quick.