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Wednesday, February 05, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:22 AM:
Here come your French headlines:Le Monde: The UN Intervenes in the Ivoirean Crisis. They've given France and the West African Economic Community authorization for a military intervention to cool things down. Let's see if we read that right... Yup, the peaceful, give negotiations a chance, we can't rush things nation of France has, only months after the crisis started and only weeks after the very first diplomatic effort fell through, decided to get the military involved. Makes the US look like the very model of patience. Of course there is a difference: it is an effort of the superior French civilization for the good of all, not the backward barbaric American cowboys for oil... that's their logic anyway. Too bad the folks in the Ivory Coast don't see it that way. They believe they consider it - as we understand it - French imperialism. But as Reuters might say, one man's peace lover is another's hyper-colonialist.
Hee hee. Along the same lines, Le Figaro quotes Iraq's Foreign Minister - Tariq Assiz: "Bush wants to make a colony of Iraq." Yeah, and France wants to make a colony of the Ivory Coast. And life in the third world would be hunky-dory if the imperialists of times past would just leave the strongmen in place and the antagonists of democracy alone. The TurkeyBlog, for the record, is offering a provisional pass to France on the Ivory Coast matter: we don't withhold the possibility that they're doing the best or only thing one could do there. But we do reserve the right to snicker every time they strike a pose they'd condemn the US for taking and the right to chortle every time something goes wrong with their ambitions if they would criticize the US for having similar ambitions.
Call it the Silver Rule: Do unto others as they in fact do unto you.
Libé: Jacques Chirac's Balancing Act. Said balancing act being to rebuff Blair and Bush and still have a say in what the latter two actually do.
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