{"id":2774,"date":"2003-02-09T20:25:20","date_gmt":"2003-02-10T03:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/02\/french-appeasement-plan\/"},"modified":"2003-02-09T20:25:20","modified_gmt":"2003-02-10T03:25:20","slug":"french-appeasement-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/02\/09\/french-appeasement-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"French appeasement plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tDen Beste is plenty worried about the French counter-offensive<\/a>, and so am I, while many<\/a> others<\/a> seem to think it’s not going to amount to much. The problem with the French (and German) plan is that it only has to muddy the waters for six weeks or so to make an invasion impractical for another year; the weather in Iraq starts to get too hot for soldiers in bio-hazard suits in March. And the plan, code-named Mirage, could certainly create enough confusion about the nature of the UN impasse with Saddam to fill up that much time. As Powell said<\/a>, it’s not a lack of inspectors that’s the problem, it’s a lack of cooperation, and the only way to make Saddam cooperate is to hold a gun to his head, and I mean a loaded gun that you intend to shoot, not a baby-blue UN gun that has no bullets in it.<\/p>\n

Why France and Germany want to do this is clear enough: they’ve both violated the arms embargo and don’t want to get caught, so it’s mandatory for both of them to leave Saddam in power. That also keeps France and Russia’s sweet oil contracts in place. That’s the only way I can characterize their motives, because I don’t see that the plan has snowball’s chance of forcing Saddam to disarm, and I want to see not only that but a regime change.<\/p>\n

This maneuvering by the French underscores the importance of Tom Friedman’s desire to replace them with India<\/a> as permanent member of the Security Council, thus depriving them of the veto:<\/p>\n

\n

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s largest Hindu nation and the world’s second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it’s become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can’t see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How long has it been since France was a significant, let alone constructive player in global politics? A hundred years, at least.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Den Beste is plenty worried about the French counter-offensive, and so am I, while many others seem to think it’s not going to amount to much. The problem with the French (and German) plan is that it only has to muddy the waters for six weeks or so to make an invasion impractical for another … Continue reading “French appeasement plan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-IK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}