Thanks for your emails on the depressingly stale Fred Kaplan column in Slate. More to add. The notion that the Bushies were too arrogant – even though they went to the U.N. over Iraq and dealt multilaterally and with considerable patience in Afghanistan – comes down to something different. Some emailers said the Bush administration’s mistake was to have made up its mind on Iraq before going to the U.N. Quelle horreur! Think about what this argument entails. What it argues is that when war has been declared on a country, when it cdredibly believes it is at risk from the nexus of WMDs and terrorism, it can only act if its friends (and envious rivals) agree. If that’s Kaplan’s view, he should say so more formally: that the U.S. can only conduct foreign policy if the French are part of the actual deliberation process. You think Paris would do the same for Washington? Second, a large part of the pro-American sentiment in the immediate wake of 9/11 was emotional, shallow and phony. Check out the irrepressible Fouad Ajami in Foreign Policy. He’s particularly sharp about the most famous of all such sentiments: Le Monde’s headline “Nous Sommes Tous Americains”:
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde’s publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani’s column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its “cynicism”; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to “our American friends” and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani’s United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can’t, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one’s own schools; one can’t strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can’t denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can’t do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani’s sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.
Just a little reality check. The French today do little intellectually but constantly circle the drain of complete ressentiment. They have no other guiding political philosophy but envy and regret. The notion that they would ever engage in a U.S.-led campaign against global terror (when they are close to the tyrants that spawn such terror and dedicated to the immiseration of Israel) is a presposterous fantasy. Far from being criticized for not being sympathetic to such opportunists and frauds, the Bush administration should be congratulated for trying to deal with them honestly at all.
The Dish 