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Able Was I, Ere ...
Monday April 28, 2003
Post-Toronto Day 4: I ended up in the Emergency Room. Read all about it by clicking here for the SARS Travelogue!
Just when you thought it was safe to order escargot or wiener schnitzel again.
The Sunday London Times has a piece, by their Paris correspondent Charles Bremner on European politics which begins thus:
EUROPE'S self-inflicted wounds over Iraq will be on display tomorrow, when the leaders of France and Germany - dubbed the "Axis of Weasels" in America - start to try to lay the groundwork for a European Union military alliance that would compete with NATO.
Pardon me? An alliance which would compete with NATO? The only reason NATO exists is to protect France an Germany against an attack by the Soviet Union. Who are the Germans and the French going to protect themselves against? An attack by Luxembourg (which IS a member of NATO)?
And even at that, do you think for one zweitens the Germans would trust the French to come to their aid if the Luxembourgers (according to the CIA Fact Book the people in Luxembourg are called "Luxembourgers" and they speak "Luxembourgish") suddenly appeared on the German border?
"Heinz! Heinz! Kommen Sie hier qvick. I sink I heard zum peoples speaking Luxembourgish."
Do the Germans and the French think they're going to be able to wring some concessions out of the US if they threaten to set up a defense alliance to "compete with NATO?"
Memo to Gerhard and Jacques:
See ya.
Signed, America.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times weighed in over the weekend running an interview with British PM Tony Blair leading:
Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.
That FT piece also has a poll which indicates "55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK's least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country's most reliable."
Where's the CNN coverage of that poll?
Speaking of CNN, they had one of those "People in the News" packages which was all about General Tommy Franks. CNN had some goofball from the Brookings Institution on who said that he didn't know whether General Franks' plan was brilliant or not but it seemed to have worked out more or less well. That's a paraphrase, but captures the essence.
Here's the thing about the Brookings Institution. It is a left-of-center think tank. Not Socialist or anything, but certainly left-of-center. But a think thank which is to the left is simply listed as a "think tank."
On the other hand, a think tank which is conservative in its outlook is ALWAYS identified as, at a minimum, a "Conservative" think tank, if not a right-wing think tank, or a FAR right-wing think tank favored by the Genghis Kahn-Adolph Hitler-Taliban-wing of the Republican Party.
CNN liked that guy's quote so much they ran it twice - in the same half-hour show.
As long as we're perusing British newspapers, here's an interesting little item in the U.K. Telegraph. A piece by Alex Spillius and Andrew Sparrow for Monday's editions details that files recovered in Baghdad show that in 2000 - not in 1975, but in 2000 - the French colluded with the Iraqi intelligence service to undermine a meeting in Paris of an international human rights organization which was looking into human rights abuses in Iraq.
According to the paper, "The files, retrieved from the looted and burned foreign ministry by The Telegraph last week, detail the warmth and strength of Iraqi-French ties."
The article implies that for this service, "... Saddam's office authorised the finance ministry to pay $383,439 to undisclosed beneficiaries."
Memo II to Jacques Chirac:
You might want to start thinking about checking out Hotels.com for accommodations on Elba.
Signed, Napoleon
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Lots and lots of links to the newspaper stories; the link to the SARS Travelogue, and a terrific Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2003 Richard A. Galen
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