What French Bashing? (I published this in the local newspaper a few months ago...)

The Wanted War

Paul Lamia “begged” me to keep reading his letter (“Why do we protest?”, 4/19/2003) so I did.

The first thing that entered my mind as I read his assertion that if a culture wants to “change enough, they will sacrifice in order to pursue it” was a recent anecdote about a U.S. Congressman talking to a French diplomat at a party. The French diplomat was belittling the Congressman regarding his support for the impending Iraq war when the Congressman decided he had finally had enough. So he asked the Frenchman if he spoke German. The Frenchman looked back at him quizzically and said no, he didn’t speak German. The Congressman replied “you’re welcome” and walked away.

The point being that if you applied Mr. Lamia’s logic to World War II, America shouldn’t have entered it – we should have waited for the conquered Europeans to have sacrificed to set themselves free. Unfortunately, due to Hitler’s Nietzschean depravity we could still be waiting...

Then I thought of the recent UPI story published just as the Iraq war started that included the following:

“A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it [out] across the [Jordanian] border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip `had shocked me back to reality.` Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera `told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start.` They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler."

Mr. Joseph has since published an article titled “I Was Wrong About The War” where he lambasted the other human shields that were present with him in Iraq as follows:

[While in Iraq] “I began to talk to the so called `human shields`. Have you asked the people here what they want? Have you talked to regular people, away from your `minder` and asked them what they want? I was shocked at the response. `We don't need to do that. We know what they want.` was the usual reply before a minder stepped up to check who I was. With tears streaming down my face in my bed in a tiny house in Baghdad … I had to say to myself `I was wrong`. How dare I claim to speak for those for whom I had never asked what they wanted!”

Then the real applicability of Mr. Lamia’s comments struck me. You see, his blithe consignment of the Iraqi people to Saddam’s torture chambers is quite wrong – it’s not what they wanted as we now see.

But the more I think of the anti-Semitic wretchedness of the French in WWII that continues to this very day – see recent reports of anti-war Jews trying to join French protests being beaten with iron bars -- the more I realize that unlike the Iraqis now, many of the French then may not have really wanted our help.

All the more ironic since the French helped free us from the British in our own Revolution.

And Mr. Lamia’s thesis would argue that we are “dependent” on the French because of their past help and Americans are therefore not “ultimately free” of them.

He would be incorrect regarding dependency -- although “ultimate freedom” from the French grows in attraction daily…