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Feb. 17th, 2003 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petermarcusFrom a Time magazine interview, French President Jacques Chirac on America:
I know the U.S. perhaps better than most French people, and I really like the United States. I've made many excellent friends there, I feel good there. I love junk food, and I always come home with a few extra pounds.
Something of a backhanded compliment, Chirac knows his audience ;)
He makes a good case, but neglects mentioning my biggest beef of this Iraqi war of the media barbs: Southern Iraq contains the Majnoon oil field -- a vast, undeveloped pool of oil that may hold the largest amount of oil in one place on the entire planet. France's TotalFinaElf holds a development contract for those fields, though the contract is not finalized. Saddam and other Iraqis are muttering that they will not complete the contract if France doesn't keep the US back. Blaming the US invasion-fever on oil would be the easiest thing for Chirac to do, as most of the world believes it. But Chirac never mentions the word.
Peruse that table, and it's a who's who of countries who profess pacifism, and yet, as Chirac admits in that interview, all of these countries have troops meddling in the sovereign affairs of other nations all over the world. Don't trust France on this issue. Don't trust America, don't trust the UK, China, or Russia.
This is an issue of enormous complexity. Oil is the easiest to point to as it is a concrete commodity, but there's also world power involved. Russia's influence in the world is declining, China's is rising, and France's has evaporated. Each of these three powers can act the easiest in veto, not in construction. There are also valid humanitarian reasons involved. Saddam is directly responsible, on his orders, for the deaths of over a million Iraqi, Kurdish, Sunni, Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Kuwaiti civilians and soldiers, from infantry soldiers to political dissidents, to teenage girls on the street he felt like raping that night. He's not going to stop because we're continuing inspections and economic sanctions.
You may be for the regime change, or against it. Trust your instincts, no matter which way they fall, and don't trust the opinions of any group of more than 100 people.
I know the U.S. perhaps better than most French people, and I really like the United States. I've made many excellent friends there, I feel good there. I love junk food, and I always come home with a few extra pounds.
Something of a backhanded compliment, Chirac knows his audience ;)
He makes a good case, but neglects mentioning my biggest beef of this Iraqi war of the media barbs: Southern Iraq contains the Majnoon oil field -- a vast, undeveloped pool of oil that may hold the largest amount of oil in one place on the entire planet. France's TotalFinaElf holds a development contract for those fields, though the contract is not finalized. Saddam and other Iraqis are muttering that they will not complete the contract if France doesn't keep the US back. Blaming the US invasion-fever on oil would be the easiest thing for Chirac to do, as most of the world believes it. But Chirac never mentions the word.
Peruse that table, and it's a who's who of countries who profess pacifism, and yet, as Chirac admits in that interview, all of these countries have troops meddling in the sovereign affairs of other nations all over the world. Don't trust France on this issue. Don't trust America, don't trust the UK, China, or Russia.
This is an issue of enormous complexity. Oil is the easiest to point to as it is a concrete commodity, but there's also world power involved. Russia's influence in the world is declining, China's is rising, and France's has evaporated. Each of these three powers can act the easiest in veto, not in construction. There are also valid humanitarian reasons involved. Saddam is directly responsible, on his orders, for the deaths of over a million Iraqi, Kurdish, Sunni, Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Kuwaiti civilians and soldiers, from infantry soldiers to political dissidents, to teenage girls on the street he felt like raping that night. He's not going to stop because we're continuing inspections and economic sanctions.
You may be for the regime change, or against it. Trust your instincts, no matter which way they fall, and don't trust the opinions of any group of more than 100 people.
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Date: 2003-02-17 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-17 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-17 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2003-02-18 06:57 pm (UTC)like any respectable french person has any right to comment on the fat/calorie content of food other than their own.....
Re:
Date: 2003-02-18 07:49 pm (UTC)It's just so...so...French!
Ze Americain knows nothing of ze haut cuisine! But I'll have a coke.
Re:
Date: 2003-02-18 09:21 pm (UTC):-P