Enfant Terrible
Timmerman, Kenneth R
Enfant Terrible The French Betrayal of America by Kenneth R. Timmerman (Crown Forum, 309 pages, $25) Reviewed by Taylor Dinerman HAT'S WRONG WITH THE FRENCH? Why have they been constantly...
...Afterwards, French support for America's campaignagainst the Taliban was tepid and based on romanticism and colonial-style fascination with Afghanistan, and on the constant need to live up to their pretensions to be a global power...
...Oil-for-Food scandal is showing the French people the severe damage their relationship with Saddam did to the integrity of their Republic...
...A nearly perfect example of the Gaullist elite's mentality...
...One example of the harm they did to America's war effort against the Ba'athist regime was the threat to extinguish Turkey's hopes of joining the EU...
...Here was a relationship that was not just in France's geopolitical interest, but was vital to the survival of western Europe, yet, it had to be kept secret...
...During the Civil War, they openly sided with the South...
...Timmerman's investigation shows how they lied to the Americans, promising support for the U.S...
...drive through the Sunni Triangle helped convince the Saddam loyalists to keep up their low level war against American forces...
...As described in Phillipe Roger's 2002 book, L'Ennemi americain, France's elites have never really accepted the legitimacy of American success...
...Their U.S...
...model with its checks and balances, and created the Third Republic as a centralized, populist democracy...
...Lionel Jospin, the worthy but dorkish Socialist prime minister who'd been installed as a result of Chirac's electoral miscalculation in 1997, came in third while the fascistic Jean Marie Le Pen came in second and moved into the runoff...
...ON APRIL 21, 2002, the French political system was bouleverse by the voters in the first round of the presidential election...
...nuclear assistance secret, the fact that the military alliance had to be concealed from the French press and public says a lot about the emotional depth of French anti-Americanism...
...Chirac won the second round with more than 80 percent of the vote, with the strong support of the Socialists in their full-blown, anti-fascist, his sy-fit mode...
...During the Civil War, they openly sided with the South...
...This kind of "friendship" is more typical of U.S...
...relations with a third world country than the ties Washington maintains with normal developed nations...
...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...Why have they been constantly seeking to weaken the one nation they ultimately depend on for their own security...
...This must have played a part in Turkey's refusal to allow the 4th Infantry Division to attack Iraq from the north...
...The French president and his foreign minister went even further than the German chancellor and lured Bush and Powell into a trap at the U.N...
...The damage this has done to France's democratic values is becoming evident—the French aspect of the U.N...
...The one thing that has regularly united Left and Right in France is their dislike, verging on contempt, for America and for whichever American president is in office...
...Nearly 40 percent of the electorate chose to support blatantly extremist totalitarian parties of the left and right...
...influence is, in part, responsible for the notorious "politique arabe," a long-term wooing of despotic Arab governments, carried out by French politicians, diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, and academics...
...This led to a quiet, semi-secret "...renewed military and strategic alliance between France and America...
...Why did they throw away America's friendship as if it were a bit of garbage...
...Timmerman is too polite to say so but France's elites have taken on many of the mental characteristics of their Arab friends, in particular, a tendency to explain the world in terms of conspiracies, corruption, and hidden motives...
...They were having problems developing penetration aids to overcome the primitive ABM system installed around Moscow, as well as designing small warhead for their tactical, or pre-strategic, Pluton missiles...
...while preparing an ambush that destroyed the British and American effort to get the U.N.'s support for the liberation of Iraq...
...counterparts would then tell them if they were on the right track...
...In spite of a huge investment that forced the French to neglect conventional forces, they had been unable to perfect the warhead designs for their submarine launched missiles...
...run Oilfor-Food program...
...After their defeat by the Prussians in 1870, they rejected the U.S...
...Like previous European leaders who, in difficult times, could always be counted on to unite their people around hatred of the Jews, Chirac chose to follow Gerhard Schroeder's example and use the Americans as scapegoats...
...In 1998, it was a Socialist foreign minister who complained that Bill Clinton's America was a dangerous "hyperpower" against which France should build a rival coalition...
...Documents found in Baghdad show Pasqua was allocated 12 million barrels worth of oil vouchers by the Ba'athist government as part of the U.N...
...It also has a dysfunctional relationship with its arms industry...
...Presidents Mitterrand and Reagan shared a common hostility to Communism, but little else...
...Az France's elites have never really accepted the legitimacy of American success...
...After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles aimed at western Europe, the relations became even closer...
...Taylor Dinerman is the founder and editor of Spaceequity.corn...
...No wonder that, according to Timmerman, "Guillet actually preferred the regime of Saddam Hussein to the United States for whom his antipathy was physically palpable...
...While there were good reasons for keeping U.S...
...In France, however, the mot d'ordre was, "Ils ne Font pas vole" ("They didn't steal it,"), that is to say, they had it coming...
...Presidents Richard Nixon and George Pompidou agreed on a system whereby French nuclear experts would explain their problems and their proposed solutions...
...Timmerman explains that in the early '70s, France's nuclear deterrent was mostly a bluff...
...Iraq is our natural ally in the Gulf...
...Backed by his Gaullist prime minister, Jacques Chirac, Mitterrand refused to support Reagan's retaliatory attack on Libya, in 1986, an indication that France would most often support Arab terrorist regimes over the U.S...
...The desire to diminish U.S...
...Earlier, in 1978, poor Jimmy Carter was greeted in Paris with caricatures 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004BOOKS IN REVIEW of him as a nuclear mad cowboy marching down the Champs Elysees, accompanied by big-breasted drum majorettes and snarling bodyguards...
...After the 9/11 attack, Chirac jumped on a plane and came to New York to pose at Ground Zero and to loudly proclaim his solidarity...
...Today, they may claim to be an ally in the war against terror, yet every terrorist victory, like that in Spain after 3/11, is also a political victory for Paris...
...Roger unearths the sad story of Edouard-Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a historian and politician, who failed to convince France to opt for limited government but succeeded with his plan to send America a great symbol of Franco-American friendship—the Statue of Liberty...
...Some experts claim that the lack of a U.S...
...The interconnection between these two problems is the core of this brilliant, but incomplete, work of investigative journalism...
...There, "surrounded by the middlemen and bagmen who helped arm Iraq in the 1980s," he was told by Bernard Guillet, the former Gaullist interior minister who was Charles Pasqua's so-called diplomatic advisor, that France's alliance with the U.S...
...It would, perhaps, have been better for all concerned if they had taken our Constitution and kept the statue...
...As the student mobs of 1968 might have put it: Chirac—Bin Laden: Meme Combat...
...Timmerman describes a magnificent dinner he attended in August 1994, near the southern French town of Grasse...
...France has an adolescent love-hate relationship with America...
...This game of 20 questions saved the French huge amounts of time and money...
...during the 1991 Gulf War had been a "big mistake" and that Saddam's Bomb was "not aimed at us any more than it was aimed at you....It's time for France to make an about-face before it's too late...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
