In the wake of all the French-bashing, American in Paris Adam Gopnik has a
revealing piece in The New Yorker about (among other things) the French
intellectuals who have, to one degree or another, defended the USA and the war
to oust Saddam Hussein:
“No completely defensible cause has ever been so poorly defended as this
one,” André Glucksmann said in his apartment, up in the Tenth
Arrondissement, the day after Bastille Day. He was speaking of the case made
for the war in Iraq. “The great mistake was to settle for the absurd argument
about weapons of mass destruction. Had the appeal for war been made on
straightforward humanitarian grounds—the case against Saddam, this guy is a
killer, we can do something about him and we must—I know it would have worked
in France. Look, Bernard Kouchner”—the co-founder of the humanitarian group
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)—“is the most popular
political figure in France, beyond question, and the moment the war was
broached he came out in support of it, on purely humanitarian grounds. He lost
perhaps one per cent in the polls. The French think, Well, arms, everyone has
arms, and the French élite knew the kind of thug and gangster that Saddam
was—they had contempt for him—and they communicated that. But people really
did learn something from Bosnia, and had the case been made resolutely that we
had another Milosevic it would have worked.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030901fa_fact1
Whether or not Glucksmann is correct, it's a view that hasn't got much
attention outside of France. The New Yorker web site also features an interview
with Gopnik in which he insists, "...the spectrum of French responses to this
moment is far wider and more varied and nuanced than most American reporting
has been prepared to admit, or able to see."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?030901on_onlineonly
Gene
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