Are We The New French?
By sideways | Related entries in Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, News, WarA couple months after we invaded Iraq I was in a cafe in Paris talking politics. Guy I was talking to was a very pro-American French lawyer. He considered the US his second home. He got off a funny, self-deprecating line about the irrelevance of French reaction. “What difference does it make? We are a small, arrogant, intellectual country, what difference does it make if we support you?”
But the thing that struck me at the time was that he said, in a shrill, worried tone, “It’s going to be a disaster.”
My response was basically, “Look, can I defend the way we’re handling the occupation? I don’t think anyone can defend it. But we just got there. Give us time. Then we’ll see.”
And he answered, “Yes, we’ll see, and it’s going to be a disaster.”
Score one for the French. The French were right about Iraq. They were right about Vietnam before that. (And why shouldn’t they be, they set the table for that fiasco.) But we Americans don’t give any points to people for being right. The fact that the French and most other Europeans were dead right about Iraq, and we were dead wrong, does not compute.
They said, “disaster,” we said, “cakewalk.” Then, inexplicably, we acted as though we believed our own propaganda. We treated Iraq like a cakewalk and we got a disaster. The French were right. We were wrong. Didn’t have to come out that way, maybe, but it did.
If we’d listened to the French, Saddam would presumably still be in power, the French government and the UN would still be playing footsie with him, the sanctions regime would undoubtedly be badly frayed by now, might in fact have collapsed entirely. Saddam would still be murdering and torturing and perhaps — but only perhaps — be looking for yellowcake and centrifuges. There’s no way to know, of course. Alternate history is shaky even as a literary genre, and it isn’t much use in the real world.
Beneath my French friend’s worried pessimism lay deep skepticism about the use of military force. The French are skeptical for some good reasons, and some bad reasons. I’m not defending their every conclusion.
Beneath my worried optimism was confidence in American power. At that point it was only still dawning on me that we had fools in charge. I cling to the fact — yes, it’s fact — that Donald Rumsfeld and his bosses were incompetent because I don’t want to go all the way to French on this. I want to believe we can still, under some circumstances, do useful work with bombs.
But it occurs to me that we might in the future want to listen a little more carefully to the French. We have in this country a parodic view of the French as military failures. This is derived almost entirely from the well-known collapse of French forces before the Nazis. But that attitude — always simplistic given Bonaparte and the tenacious French performance in World War I — is a relic of a bygone era. We have our own military failures now. In Korea we fought to a draw. In Vietnam we lost. In Gulf War I we started well and booted the follow-through. In Afghanistan we are losing. In Iraq we are losing.
It’s not 1945 anymore, and we’re more French than we like to admit.
(cross-posted from Sideways Mencken.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 and is filed under Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, News, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 26th, 2006 at 11:15 am
“Yes, we’ll see, and it’s going to be a disaster.�
The irony of this is that members of the DoD, including Rumsfeld, may have actually agreed with this sentiment if, from the beginning, a large expeditionary force of half-a-million troops been sent to fight and occupy Iraq indefinitely. The disaster we are facing today stems from the fateful decision by Rummy and the DoD to swiftly move into bagdhad, cut the head off the regime, and leave 30 days later so as to avoid the type of chaos we are seeing now. It obviously didn’t work.
Considering that it was the Bush administration who declared Iraq to be integral part of the greater war on terror, how could he have not forseen what has happenned? That is the greatest mistake of his presidency.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:34 am
America’s French Connection
…Which makes it ironic that we would choose to deride the French as pessimistic pansies when they’ve proven right so often. I never really thought about it that way until tonight while reading Donklephant….
September 27th, 2006 at 7:43 am
The french never would have signed on to the coalition if there were more troops or a better strategy for post-war iraq. Look how they bailed out on stopping Hezbollah from re-arming in lebenon, or how they have basically accepted a nuclear-armed Iran, or how they respond to riots with youth-job initiatives or some crap. Not to worry; in 30 years they will become the Islamic Republic of Paristine, and I doubt they would remain pansies then.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
I’ve got to disagree on this one. The French can’t seem to muster the will for any kind of foreign deployment. They even had to be shamed into living up to their troop commitments in Lebanon. We’re a long way from that. The basis of American power is our ability to deploy massive people and equipment. We might not be able to put a 9 million man army in the field anymore but we can still pour men and material on most problems.
More than that though, is the “crusader� mentality (for lack of a better word) which is alive and well in the US. Most Americans still believe that we are the good guys and that America has a special place in world affairs. This is what the Democrats can’t seem to grasp. Take a look back at news stories and peoples reactions (including your own) immediately after 9-11. If Bush had called for sacrifices, he would have had the overwhelming support of the nation.
Where we run into problems is with prolonged engagements. Once the buzz of going to war wears off, people are going to start asking questions. This has been true of any country in any time period. The President needs to have good answers to those questions and Bush hasn’t.
So don’t confuse Bush’s incompetence with American impotence. If Bush had said “I need to put 400,000 men in Afghanistan to win the war and secure the peace.� It would have happened. Instead he said “sit back, relax, do some online shopping. I’m going to contract out the hunt for Osama and waste our army on this pet project I dreamed up before 9-11.�
Sorry for the long rant
September 27th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
There is a little quote I came across the other day – in relation to something quite different…
October 11th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Greetings Kevin,
although I generally (and more) agree with your post, you seem to forget that there are now about 14000 French servicemen and servicewomen commissioned of foreign deployments including Afghanistan, the Balkans, Côte-d’Ivoire… Of course, this cannot compare in scale with the might of current US involvments, yet I must disagree about this idea that France cannot muster the will for foreign deployment as an idiosyncratic attitude of all times.
On the other hand, I will certainly admit that since French military power has known a significant drop (euphemism) in overseas operational potential during the second half of the nineties (because of ill-planned turnover, end of conscription, extended delays for Rafale deliveries, etc, etc. and as such many bad “good” reasons – but mainly because of insufficient funding), one must understand that the use of force by the French Government is each time most parsimoniously thought over by FDoD (very strict quantities of troops, armoured vehicles, aircrafts, ships – limpid clear rules of engagement, etc)… I give you that!
What I mean is that the French policy concerning foreign military involvement is not doctrine… right now, it’s rather economy!
PS. Surely an irrelevant post of mine. Yet, I beleive that French policies (I think of Lebanon here), however important or not, should be understood for what they really are.
October 13th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Greetings Kevin and Pierre,
It’s no surprise to read pathetic and simplified analyses posted here and there about both the US and french forein policy. To make a long story short: “mine is bigger than yours” as Jimmy the Dhimmi would say, comparing US and France strenghts, or “parisistan”, witch is the fox news socio-political forecast for France. The “muslims riots” description was false, but was adequate enough to match with the fear maintained by the medias. The french were right on Irak, and are right on Lebanon. That does not mean that Lebanon is a future disaster, it is already, but that they have learned the balkanic lessons: You cant maintain peace without a big gun and a capacity to return fire against a laughing opponent. That’s the reason why the french played the watch, a strategy that pays: If UN forces are under attack, they will fire. Period. Your blog is a must read. Thanks!