Category: Networks

When asked which nations were not going to support regime change in Iraq, Rumsfeld told the Senate: “there are three of four who’ve said they wouldn’t help at all — Libya, Cuba, and Germany”.

Ouch, mein herr.

Why Germany? For one thing, they’ve played a major role in arming Iraq, and they know it.

It’s pile-on the French time, what with the offensive and clueless remarks emanating from Villepin yesterday and all. Chistopher Hitchens has The Rat That Roared at WSJ.com (requires a sub):

There is of course another France — the France of Petain and Poujade and Vichy and of the filthy colonial tactics pursued in Algeria and Indochina.

Andrew Sullivan has his say in The Anglosphere vs Saddam:

President Chirac also announced that his government will be sending 3000 advisors from the elite Force du Collaborateur Francaise (French Collaboration Force) to assist the Iraqis in collaborating with the Americans while pretending to be part of a non-existent resistance movement.”

And Mark Steyn soberly warns that France is no Eurowimp:

Let’s say Saddam has long-range WMDs. If he nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution before responding. If he nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq would be a crater by lunchtime.

All I’ve got to add to this is that one should never underestimate the French, for what they lack in strength, they have many times over in guile and cunning. Why do you suppose their neighbors hate them so much?

There’s an important article about the Middle East in The New Yorker this month. Here’s a teaser, and I’ll add more later.

Rumsfeld believes that one long-held belief among Middle East analysts is overdue for reconsideration: the idea that doctrinal differences prevent Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and religious and secular Muslims, from pursuing common projects in anti-American terrorism. This is a subject of great relevance today, because the Bush Administration contends that Baghdad is a sponsor of Al Qaeda; critics of the Administration’s foreign policy argue that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are natural enemies. “The argument is that Al Qaeda has got a religious motivation, somehow or other, and the Iraqi regime is considered to be a secular regime,” Rumsfeld said. “The answer to that is, so what? The Iraqi regime will use anything it can to its advantage. Why wouldn’t they use any implement at hand?”

This just in from CNS: France Surrenders to Texas High School

Paris (CNSNews.com) – What began as a six-day chaperoned music tour by a group of suburban Houston teenagers ended in an epic conquest in the pre-dawn hours of Friday morning as French military and government officials offered their unconditional surrender to students of the Aldine, Texas Eisenhower High School Music Department.

Accepting the surrender, Eisenhower High School Band and Choral Director Gary Baumer praised the French for avoiding further bloodshed and vowed an immediate postwar rebuilding effort.

“We hope to achieve national recovery by prom,” said Baumer. “The seniors have voted for the theme “Springtime in Paris.”

In a goodwill gesture, Baumer said the victorious students would soon begin releasing most of the 400,000 French prisoners of war they had captured during the brutal three-day campaign.

“We want the prisoners reunited with their families,” said Justin Gonzales, a junior tenor in the Eisenhower Glee Chorus. “Besides, you can’t even begin to imagine the smell.”

Eisenhower High is planning a bake sale and car wash to send the football team to Germany, but that’s not really a fair fight.

Link via Captain Quick.

I set off the alarm while passing through the metal detector in an airport today, and the TSA guy made me take off my shoes, empty my pockets, and submit to a very careful hand scan. When he was done, he told me: “after we invade Iraq we won’t have to do this any more”.

So let’t get on with it.

Via Matt Welch, U.S. to Make Iraq Intelligence Public (washingtonpost.com)

“The United States possesses several pieces of information which come from the work of our intelligence that show Iraq maintains prohibited weapons,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview published yesterday in an Italian newspaper. “Once we have made sure it can be done safely, I think that in the next week or soon after we can make public a good part of this material.”

This “Adlai Stevenson moment” will end the debate.

ABC News reports: EU Increasingly Divided Over Iraq Issue

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was “making a charade of inspection,” signaling that the United States’ closest ally had only drawn closer. Straw said “time has almost run out. If this failure to comply continues, then Iraq will have to face serious consequences.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, however, left the EU meeting reasserting Berlin’s steadfast opposition to war against Iraq.

I wonder what part of “last chance” Germany fails to comprehend? Saddam has failed to cooperate with the UN inspectors, and has made it clear to its scientists that they had better not comply, under penality of death.

It seems to me that the last chance is over. The longer the charade continues, the better Saddam gets at hiding his weapons, the better he gets at building missiles to carry them, and the more weapons he builds. This is not supposed to be a game of cat and mouse.

I hope the President stresses the lack of cooperation and the Iraqi support of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the speech tonight, and that we continue massing troops around Iraq. If the invasion is to be lead by a coalition of Anglosphere nations and sensisble Europeans, leaving Germany, France, Sweden, and Hollywood (“Now that I’m sober, I watch a lot of news”) out in the cold, so be it.

Following up on the Iraq War column we mentioned previously, Tom Friedman has a fresh virus alert:

Unfortunately, when it comes to enlisting allies, the Bush team is its own worst enemy. It has sneered at many issues the world cares about: the Kyoto accords, the World Court, arms control treaties. The Bush team had legitimate arguments on some of these issues, but the gratuitous way it dismissed them has fueled anti-Americanism. No, I have no illusions that if the Bush team had only embraced Kyoto the French wouldn’t still be trying to obstruct America in Iraq. The French are the French. But unfortunately, now the Germans are the French, the Koreans are the French, and many Brits are becoming French.

I knew Gaulishness was a problem, but I never knew it was contagious. It must be carried by the cheese.

Michael J. Totten reports:

PARIS, Jan. 24 – French President Jacques Chirac issued an unconditional surrender to Baghdad today, and declared he was upholding the great tradition of French foreign policy. “Saddam Hussein, like Hitler before him and unlike the current American president, was elected by his people. We admire Iraq for standing against the unilateralist arrogance of the American cowboy regime, and we hereby swear eternal allegiance. Iraq’s interests are our interests and, besides, we need the oil.”

The dude runs an excellent blog.

— Mrs. Bennett urges you to cast your attention in the general direction of Natalie Solent:

The Arabs are at the present time the world’s premier admirers of those who “martyr” themselves while killing children and other civilians. However we must not neglect the Western, nominally-Christian world’s own substantial contribution to this field of human endeavour. On October 23rd 1993 the IRA exploded a bomb in a fish shop in the Shankill Road. They used a bomb with a fuse set for eleven seconds: so you can safely assume that the bombers intended to give themselves time to get away but to kill the customers and staff in the shop without warning. And kill them it did, nine of them, including Michelle Baird aged seven and Leanne Murphy aged thirteen.

Gerry Adams was a pallbearer at the funeral of one of the Shankill bombers, and Oakland, CA (home of Barbara Lee) just named a street after him. We seem to have a bit of a consistency problem here.