The France of Jacques Chirac
A review of The French Betrayal of America, by Kenneth R. Timmerman.
By Arnold Beichman
Posted February 10, 2005
This review appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of the Claremont Review
of Books. Click here to send a comment.
As a young boy during and after World War I, I read everything I could
find about the romantically named Lafayette Escadrille, the young
Americans who became fighter pilots to help France in her war against
Wilhelmine Germany. But living and thinking through the 20th and into
the 21st century, I find myself torn between my boyish love for France
and its culture and my despair over what France has become.
Kenneth Timmerman's The French Betrayal of America is a savage,
heavily documented indictment of today's France, the France of Jacques
Chirac, for whom the U.S. has become an enemy country.
It was Chirac who made Saddam Hussein the power he became in the
Middle East. It was the French nuclear weapons establishment that had
almost finished building a nuclear facility at Osirak, known
derisively as O'Chirac, near Baghdad, when in 1981 Israel bombed it to
rubble. Chirac built Osirak for Saddam even though in a 1975 interview
Saddam had admitted: "The agreement with France is the first concrete
step toward the production of the Arab atomic weapon."
By 1983, Iraq was purchasing 51.5% of all French arms exports. In the
U.N. Security Council, France became Saddam's defender. Chirac's
unbreakable friendship with Saddam propped up a regime concerning
whose accomplishments the Washington Post observed (July 7, 2003): "An
estimated 290,000 people are missing and believed to be buried in mass
graves throughout Iraq. In a country of 22 million, that is more than
1 percent of the population, the equivalent of about 3.5 million
people in the United States. The vast majority of these bodies have
not been found."
Timmerman's book of revelations is an eye-opener. Even in the days of
the socialist François Mitterand, he argues, France looked upon the
U.S. as a dangerous rival. That fear of the U.S. increased when the
Soviet Union fell: no more need for American protection against the
Bolsheviks. In 1991, L'Express revealed that between 1987 and 1989
French intelligence had planted moles in the French offices of IBM,
Texas Instruments, and Corning Glass to steal economic and industrial
secrets on behalf of French state-owned enterprises. An NBC
documentary discovered that French airlines regularly planted
microphones in the seats of their first-class compartment, to record
conversations of U.S. businessmen.
According to Timmerman, the U.S. is now reacting to French enmity with
some harshness. For example, the French military attaché in Washington
was informed that France would not be getting its usual slots at the
March 2004 Red Flag exercise, NATO's premier live flying war game. And
President Bush personally vetoed a request from the French chief of
staff to visit CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Nonetheless,
U.S. nuclear laboratories are still helping the French, the U.S. is
still subsidizing the French nuclear weapons establishment, and, most
unbelievable of all, the Bush Administration is offering Chirac the
secrets of the U.S. national missile defense.
In France today, anti-semitism, both right-wing and left-wing, runs
deep. Today the Paris Metro is no longer safe for Jews or those whom
the Muslim gangs think are Jews. The Muslim population in France
itself approaches 10% and is growing more influential each day. A
recently published book, La Republique des laches (The Republic of
Cowards), mocks the French regime for its retreat before its Muslim
inhabitants' anti-democratic behavior. For instance, instead of
walking out of the stadium when the Marseillaise was booed at a
French-Algerian soccer match, then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stayed
on. And though the increasingly influential Muslim presence suffered a
setback when the government forbade Muslim girls to wear their veils
in school, separatist Muslims continue to demand that school
gymnasiums and swimming pools be segregated.
One of the great errors in the aftermath of World War II was to have
enshrined France among the permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council (see Jeremy Rabkin, "No Miracle in San Francisco,"
Summer 2004), leaving no room for democracies of far greater
importance to the world today. If the president of France now regards
America as an enemy country and French diplomacy is directed against
the United States, all of which is fully and dramatically documented
by Timmerman, it is time to think hard about what should be done.
Oh, and about those Americans who gave their lives fighting for French
liberties, Timmerman tells this story: When Charles De Gaulle pulled
France out of the NATO unified military command and ordered the United
States to depart from bases in the Paris suburb of
Saint-German-en-Laye, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly asked him if
he also wanted us to take the graveyards full of our dead at Omaha
Beach. Three belated cheers for LBJ
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"I have a simple four-word answer: Save Social Security first."
-- Bill Clinton (January 27, 1998 State of the Union Address)
"Why would I listen to losers?" -- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
res0mp8t@NOSPAMverizon.net
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