French Foreign Policy

By now you probably have heard public personalities express the sentiment that “France should be bombed after we are done with Iraq”. Such rants typify the extent of the lunacy that seems to have taken root. So the latest verbal attack upon France, comes as no shock. The French reject the “call to war” based upon a contrived hysteria that has infected the United States since 911. Just a year ago, French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine said Europeans were "unanimous in not supporting the Middle East policy of the White House" and thought it was a "mistake to blindly accept the policy of pure repression" conducted by Mr Sharon.

He added: “The solution to the Middle East problem will not come from Washington but from a change in the Israeli government's policy.” In an interview with Le Parisien French newspaper, Vedrine said the Israelis should realize that such policy which is based only on dealing with security matters will only lead to complicating the situation, adding that France has warned against this a long time ago.

No surprise, coming from the usual suspects, Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director says: "By attempting to intimidate American Jews, Mr. Vedrine has gone beyond his usual anti-Israel rhetoric."

Isn’t it about time to shed all the diversions, detours and disinformation and admit that the coming war to occupy Iraq is really about implementing a ‘Greater Israel’ policy, as the oil booty is divided up among the liberators? It just seems that the French have the guts to speak aloud what everyone knows and admits in private. So when President Jacques Chirac joins in with his German counterpart, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in a joint statement: “that they were of one mind on Iraq and determined to avoid a conflict there”, the wrath of the ‘Israeli First’ movement goes into action.

That is why you see all the bad press accusing the French of being anti-Semitic, while their true motives are nationalists, based upon hard learned lessons. They maintain a prudence for avoiding a quagmire, who’s swamp can not be drained, as long as the policies of the Zionist State are lead by the nefarious Ariel Sharon. Before he was assassinated, former Christian warlord Elie Hobeika guarded taped "evidence" implicating Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the Sabra and Shatila massacres during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. An Israeli commission of inquiry in 1983 found Sharon "indirectly responsible" for the camp massacres. A Belgium court ruled that a war crimes suit brought by 23 massacre survivors was inadmissible because prosecutions could occur in Belgium for crimes committed abroad only if the suspect was present in Belgium.

Their highest court has indefinitely shelved an appeal hearing, on this ruling. Wonder if that same technicality would be envoked towards all other like circumstances?

So when the French object to wholesale indiscriminate support for Israel, when their policies are hijacked but a wicked cousin of Saddam Hussein, why should France be chastised? An independent Franco foreign policy is not the villain, its the demented animosities of a newly re-elected outlaw and a paper tiger thug, that are the lunatics.

Examine the French colonial experience in Algeria and compare it to the current imperial Zionist policy under Sharon. Any similarities?

Like the Israelis, the French were determined to destroy the infrastructure that underpinned their adversaries' terror campaign. To a large extent, they succeeded. About 400,000 troops mounted a pitiless but effective campaign that included mass executions and the most barbarous forms of physical torture. The FLN was crushed militarily -- at horrific human cost. The French estimate that about 350,000 Algerians were killed during the eight years of war. The postindependence Algerian government claimed that the number was closer to 1.5 million. The French death toll was around 18,000.

But reactions in France and overseas to the sickening tactics that the "paras" and the Foreign Legion had used to win their victory, and to the violence perpetrated by the settlers, enabled the Algerian nationalists to snatch a political victory from the jaws of military defeat.

Within France there was a growing realization that the political price of what was almost certainly a temporary military victory was simply too high. Internationally isolated, the French could not sustain their self-image as a liberal and democratic state while at the same time brutally repressing a people who were seeking the very liberté that the French themselves had long championed.

The book Mr. Sharon has been reading is A Savage War of Peace, Alastair Horne's definitive history of the Algerian war.

Charles de Gaulle was the ultimate French Nationalist, but defied those in the foreign legion that sought to control a colonial empire. He was correct to withdraw from Algeria. As long as Israel pursues the ethnic cleansing policies of Lukid maniacs. No less than that other war criminal, Henry Kissinger understands the stakes: “I regard a total Israeli defeat as inevitable. That means the ruin of the Israeli company and the country. We will destroy ourselves.”

Who has all the nukes, Sharon or Hussein? Any doubt that Israeli’s will resort to their use? Lest you not forget, it was Moshe Dayan who said: “Israel must be like a crazy dog, too dangerously to touch around it”.

The venerable Economists publication sums up perfectly. “Mr Chirac, in common with virtually all French politicians, is uneasy with the concept of an American “hyperpower” that has no need or (in French eyes) no willingness to listen to the advice of lesser powers. Mr Chirac is not instinctively eager for a supranational EU; like De Gaulle, however, he sees a united Europe as a necessary counterweight to the American hegemon.” Dominique de Villepin, France's foreign minister stated: “If war is the only way to resolve this problem, we are going down a dead end. Already we know for a fact that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs are being largely blocked, even frozen. We must do everything possible to strengthen this process.” At which point, he added that France would remain “true to its principles, to the very end.”

The hawks within the Bush administration are forcing a Sharon foreign policy upon the United States. The French recognize the folly and danger for the entire world to allow the ‘so called’ war on terror to become the excuse for a war of conquest that benefits Zionist expansion. That’s not anti-Semitic, it is common sense. If France is mature enough to stand firm for French interests, when will Americans developed the self dignity to cast off foreign entanglements that only threaten our nation? What’s the next pretext - innuendo that Bin Laden is using Saddam Hussein’s WMD for the Columbia disaster! In some ways its just as absurd to contend that insane U.S. Middle East policy protects the interests of the American public.

Sharon is no de Gaulle and Bush is no Washington.

SARTRE - February 2, 2003