Fascinating op-ed piece by David Ignatius in the WaPo that seems to suggest rapprochement with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys:
Once every five or six weeks, a French presidential adviser named Maurice Gourdault-Montagne flies to Washington to meet with his American counterpart, national security adviser Stephen Hadley. They spend several hours coordinating strategy on Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other hot spots, and then the Frenchman flies home. In between trips, the two men talk often on the phone, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Welcome to the French Connection. Though the link between the top foreign policy advisers of Presidents Bush and Jacques Chirac is almost unknown to the outside world, it has emerged as an important element of U.S. planning. On a public level, France may still be the butt of jokes among American politicians, but in these private diplomatic contacts, the Elysee Palace has become one of the White House’s most important and effective allies.
***America’s key intermediary in this search for international consensus has been France. Sen. Hillary Clinton may have been using political hyperbole last month when she charged that the administration has been “outsourcing” its Iran policy to France and other European countries, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. An administration that was blasted during its first term for being overly unilateralist has indeed decided to work more closely with allies. Contrary to Clinton, I think that’s a positive development — and one that’s likely to make U.S. policy more effective.
Mon Dieu!
Clever
Did Clinton actually say that it would be less effective/negative? Maybe she just wanted credit to be given where credit was due. It can’t be an accident that this wasn’t touted as “coalition building”…I’m guessing HC was feeding it to the wingers listening in as a sign of “weakness” by the admin…or maybe just a rousing game of “find the conspiracy!”
BumperStickerist
—-
Sacre Vache!
—
‘holy cow!’
chefrad
Samuel Johnson famously said, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”
To that I would add, “hating the French is the first refuge of bumpkins.”
TM Lutas
I think that the “hate France” meme had its genesis in French behavior, not american bigotry. If France’s behavior has changed, they deserve different treatment on our part. I can’t imagine any red state people disagreeing. There may be doubt about France’s sincerity and disagreement over timing and method on how/when to bury the hatchet but it’s not going to be a big deal. Persistently acting like a friend will get France treated like a friend, and that’s how it should be.
Lines
And what French behavior would that be? Questioning and challenging the US on their usage of questionable intelligence in a rush to war?
How about that France has a greater force in Afghanistan and has never wavered in their support of that part of the War on Terror?
ooops, I’m sorry, that doesn’t support your “France bashing”, so just forget I mentioned it.
stickler
You write “acting like a friend,” but I think you meant “doing what we tell them to do, when we tell them to do it.”
France, unfortunately for the rubes in the sticks, is an actual nation-state with its own interests. Sometimes those coincide with ours. When we are led by a bumpkin and his retinue of fools, though, the French don’t have much trouble telling us to go to hell. As they should.
Kav
As an Englishman with all attendant prejudices, who was living in the US when the ‘Freedom Fries’ crap started I think that this:
is true insofar as it goes. However, I was shocked at the vehemence of the anti-French sentiment just for disagreeing with the US. Remember at the time there was no hint of dodgy dealings in Iraq, though there has been much retro-justification spouted with the aid of those powerful hindsight glasses. Plus, the strength of the ant-French rhetoric from the man in the street spoke to a bubbling cauldron of bigotry towards our Gallic cousins. Just my opinion.
You see sometimes friends fall out, and that’s OK. If I fall out with my friend , I don’t immediately start downtalking and insulting her whilst using her name as an insult for other people I don’t like. Surely acting like a friend can mean disagreeing without expecting your friend to treat you like shit?
Kirk Spencer
“Act like a friend.” heh – sorry, but they did.
Go back to 2002, when we were all terrified that Saddam had some sort of smallpox virus and we were terribly short of the stuff. Do you recall what France did?
Gave us millions of doses. At no charge.
And right after that we started the lines about “cheese-eating” and such.
So… just who was acting like a friend?
jg
When your base is really good at showing hatred then you play to that. Liberals suck, dems suck, the french suck, muslims suck, Jews suck, foreigners suck. You don’t a platform, just an issue that lets you encourage that behavior. You’ll be counting votes while your dem opponenent is trying to reason his way through the issue.
jg
You don’t *need* a platform
Steve
I don’t think our country benefits when people play politics with foreign policy. If Hillary honestly believes the administration is deferring too much to the French, then fine, she can make that argument. If she’s just taking a cheap shot in order to tack to the right of the President, I don’t like that.
By the same token, it really pisses me off to hear all the Republicans belittle Kerry for wanting to work with Europe, for proposing that we let Russia sell nuclear fuel to Iran, and then once the election is over, be all like “We were lying, those were great ideas, but we wanted to win the election!” Don’t play games with national security.
SeesThroughIt
Don’t worry about France. Bill O’Reilly’s boycott will lay waste to that nation before long. Just ask the Paris Business Review.
superfrenchie
//seems to suggest rapprochement with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys://
//I think that the “hate France” meme had its genesis in French behavior, not american bigotry.//
It’s not bigotry to call people “monkeys”?
It’s not bigotry to spit on the graves of the people who died for their country?
France lost many more people in WWII than the US (593,000 vs 405,400). In WWI, France lost almost 5% of its population (0.1% for the US). I can assure you: none of them died with their hands up.
And besides, what exactly did I, as a 40-something year old Frenchman, do to deserve being called a “surrender monkey”? Did I surrender to anyone? Yes, some people did that in France 65 years ago. They’re now all dead. Do I go around calling every American a racist just because 65 years ago lynching was fine and dandy in America?
stickler
Superfrenchie, the historical ignorance of the American population knows no bounds. I’ve met reasonable, literate, apparently-educated Americans who seriously believe that the USA suffered more casualties in World War II than the Soviet Union did.
I also used to think the idiocy of 1917 — when we renamed dachshunds into Liberty Dogs, sauerkraut into Liberty Cabbage, and German measles into Liberty Measles — was the lowest point in American cultural history. And then came 2003 and Freedom Fries. A long, sordid slide from the days when General Pershing proclaimed “Lafayette, we are here!”
Our hatred of France, though, is partly due to the fact that France and the USA occupy the same philosophical space. Our revolutions came at almost the same time, and used the same rhetoric (freedom, human rights, etc.). How can the world have two shining beacons of freedom? This confuses and angers many Americans.
Krista
superfrenchie – excellent post. I really don’t know where the French-bashing came from, but it’s terrible, really. I would love for anybody in the U.S. who smirkingly made fun of the French to go over there and see all the graveyards in Cambrai, Arras, Lille, and the rest of northern France. It’s ignorance, it’s mean, and it makes them look like bratty little shitheads. And as far as the “French people are rude” meme, I found that any French person I encountered while there was helpful, polite, and kind.
Chefrad
Even if we were to assume. arguendo, that “the French” are as one in despising us en bloc, what are we to make of the Pew polls that show this administration has made us disliked nearly everywhere else as well?
If I had a kid who was treated like a pariah in 7 schools in a row I would probably venture asking if he had some role in the problem as well.
It is not mere envy either— that is what a trip to Paris (or Berlin or Madrid) would prove to any open-minded America in a hurry. The fault lies not in the stars (& stripes) but in ourselves. It behooves a superpower to walk gingerly around the prides and prejudices of older, more decorous nation states who have had half their history wiped out in World Wars.
Yet the very people on this blog who bemoan the lack of due decorum in the Capitol Rotunda last night are all too ready to flip the bird at the Invalide and wear bermuda shorts into the Sistine Chapel. These people would be doing us all a favor if they took their own advice and stayed home.
Insulting France is all big, empty talk, akin to foam fingers at NFL games and arab kids thowing bread at Nuns’ heads in Paris. The difference is, those kids outgrow it. Our jingoists just stay at it, year after embarassing year.
superfrenchie
To return to the subject at hand for a minute, what seems to have prompted the bigoted insult in the introduction of the quoted article (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be an understanding that the French are finally waking up to Islamic terrorism and are at long last falling in line with the Americans on what to do about it.
That line of thinking as a matter of fact appears to me to be a pretty common one in the US.
There’s just one problem. It’s completely bogus.
The French have understood what islamofacism is all about for a lot longer than the Americans have. Since 1995 to be exact. When a series of attacks by extremist militants killed 16 and injured hundreds.
Just because the French have not felt the need to invade a country unrelated to that Islamic extremism does not mean they have not done anything about it.
May be those who hold this belief are confusing us with the British…:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_islamist_terror_bombings_in_France
PS: Thanks to those on this board who see French-bashing for exactly what it is: ignorant bigotry!
Steve
Two points:
1) When I was in Paris on my honeymoon, I noticed a plaque on the local schoolhouse mourning the French children who were killed or deported during WWII. As I continued walking around the city I realized that marker was on EVERY schoolhouse. Moving stuff. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have my country under foreign occupation.
2) If I were to read French blogs, do you think I would come across any slurs or bad jokes directed at the US? Just wondering about that.
Lines
Steve, I would wonder if you would find defenders of the US from those slurs and bad jokes like we’ve seen here at BJ? I have a friend in Australia that is moving back to the US and her friends all think she’s nuts, mostly from their extreme anti-American sentiments.
And their in that fabulous Axis of Allies
superfrenchie
Steve: // If I were to read French blogs, do you think I would come across any slurs or bad jokes directed at the US?//
It depends.
What do you mean by the US?
If you’re talking about policy, or about George Bush, you likely will.
If on the other hand you’re talking about Americans in general, I would venture to say that you won’t find many.
Not to say that it does not exist, but nothing like French-bashing around here.
See, contrary to popular belief, anti-Americanism in France is directed towards policies and politicians, and is rather an elite sport. The “common Frenchman” does not like the war in Iraq, that’s a fact (then again, they’re not alone on that one…) He probably also has a few stereotypes such as “Americans are fat” and “they don’t care about the rest of the world”. But that’s a long way from calling an entire people “cowards”, “chickens”, “monkeys”, “weasels” or “worms”. Or spitting on the graves of their war dead. IMHO.
Finally, remember this: French-bashing does not affect much the average Frenchman. By and large, the French are not even really aware of the hate they are now the object of in the US. The people affected the most are the people who live here. People like my 13-year old daughter, who has dual citizenship and has to endure the insults thrown at her by kids who hear those things at the dinner table and on prime time TV without any kind of objection and are only too happy to play the insult game that nobody ever told them was wrong.
Steve
Well, it was an honest question, and I appreciate your answer.
I can’t say I encountered any anti-Americanism whatsoever traveling around the UK and France. I certainly got the impression from watching the Olympics in Greece that the spectators didn’t seem to have any animus towards the American competitors at all, even though many of them surely have an issue with U.S. policies. It’s nice to see people can keep that straight. I feel guilty that we don’t reciprocate.
By the way, the big lie everyone gets told before traveling to Europe is “don’t worry, they all speak English over there anyway.” Well, obviously many people in Paris do speak English, but still, a totally misleading statement!
John
YAAAAAAWWWWN….
It’s sad that journalists have to state such obvious points about France.
I bet when officials meet between the 2 countries, the American pulls his buddy aside, puts his arm over his shoulder and says:
“Hey, ya know all that “freedom fries” and “fuck the French” talk is just politics. We got a strong simplistic base in this country that eats that shit up. They love it. (then whispers:)’Helps us in the polls, ya know.”
To which his French counterpart chuckles and says:
“No harm done, my friend. We know it’s just politics. Hell, we do the same shit in France. When times are tough, we can always play our rubes against eachother. We gotta make a livin’, right?”
They crack up laughing, pattin’ eachother on the shoulder. Then they light a couple of stogies, grab the brandy and go out on the balcony of the White House.
“Hey
chefrad
Having been in France a good deal, I always got the impression that thet disliked the Brits more than they did Americans OR Germans.
After all, how can a nation of gastronomes respect a nation that sips hot water with cold toast?