Media Echoes: Le Monde: The Mistake By Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann and Romain Goupil

Ed note: The French original appears here. The translation appears here, thanks to The Radical. This has to be one of the best pieces of French writing that I've read since my Rimbaud days. Kudos to The Radical for translating this, Europundits for publishing it, and Bruckner et al for proving that there are still French people who remain worthy successors to Rousseau.

What joy it is to see the jubilant Iraqi people celebrating their liberation and…their liberators! A couple of months ago, France claimed to be funneling the US’s belligerent ardor into a legal, UN channel. Unfortunately, the opposition to the war degenerated into a systematic opposition to Washington.

Whether correctly perceived or not, our leaders gave the impression of protecting Saddam by insisting upon arm-wrestling with the Anglo-Saxon allies.

Friendship gave way to overt hostility, despite the diplomatic smiles and the denials which functioned as confessions: “The Americans aren’t our enemies”…By its intransigence and its promise of a veto “regardless of the circumstances,” our country divided Europe, paralyzed NATO and the UN, destroying the possibility of avoiding a military confrontation through a precise, joint ultimatum that would have forced out the Iraqi dictator. Far from avoiding a war, the “camp of peace” precipitated one by playing Asterix against Uncle Sam. A ridiculed France has now removed itself from the game. You don’t run a great country by getting high on media successes and rhetorical jousts. In this regard, Tony Blair, who took the risk of confronting his electorate while remaining faithful to his convictions, revealed himself to be a true head of state.

The President’s conduct reflected public opinion. In the future, we will talk about the hysteria, the collective intoxication that shook France for months on end, the anguish of the Apocalypse that seized our better halves, the almost Soviet ambiance that welded together 90% of the population in a triumph of monolithic thought, allergic to the slightest dissent. In the future, we will have to study the media’s partisan coverage of the war—with few exceptions, this coverage was more activist than objective, minimizing the horrors of the Baathist tyranny in order to better reproach the Anglo-American expedition, guilty of all crimes, all problems, all misfortunes in the region.

For weeks, Television Baghdad invaded our brains and our television screens to the point where the very few Iraqi dissident guests had to apologize for existing…to the point where a French singer, in an act of remarkable obscenity, left the stage of a variety show on France 3 upon the arrival of Saad Salam, a film-maker and Iraqi opponent. We will have to explain why the Kurdish minority was, during this period, forbidden from protesting when Saddam’s hatchet men paraded on our boulevards, brandishing Saddam’s portraits, screaming slogans to his glory, going so far as to lynch the poet-in-exile, Salah Al-Hamdani. We will have to analyze the alarming proportion of French (33%) who, not wanting a coalition victory, pronounced themselves, de facto, in favor of Hussein’s victory.

Let’s face it: Anti-Americanism is not an accident that happened over-night or a simple reticence in response to the Bush Administration. Anti-Americanism is a political creed that unites one person to another, in spite of their differences—the Front national and the Greens, socialists and conservatives, communists and separatists…On the left as well as on the right, it is rare to find someone who did not give in to this “nationalism of imbeciles” which is unfailingly symptomatic of resentment and decline.

We were recently pleased to confront American narrow-mindedness with French intelligence and to confront the New World, led by “King UbuBush,” with Old World wisdom. And what was the result? One of the most appalling dictators in the Middle East fell, and France did nothing to contribute to his demise.

On the contrary, she did everything that she could to slow down Hussein’s fall. When Baghdad danced, France pouted. While certain intellectuals and politicians expressed their confusion, indeed their “nausea” when faced with an Anglo-Saxon victory, the weekly magazine, Marianne, led with “The Catastrophe” on the day that Baghdad tasted its first hours of deliverance. We just have to accept that there will always exist in our democracies a significant number of citizens from whom a dictator’s demise will be a cause for despair. This land of human rights perhaps doesn’t care so much for the liberty of others as she claims to and publicizes. From Jean-Marie Le Pen to Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Saddam Hussein had, among us, many friends, discreetly born again as “friends of the Iraqi people.” Will the Republic, along with Berlin and Moscow, institute a day of national morning for the disappeared dictator?

The second Gulf War has been a wonderfully revealing incident. An outbreak of anti-Semitism and ethnic hatred, an economic and social crisis, the desecration of a British military cemetery, the beating up of Jews and Iraqi opposition during the great “peace” marches, an alliance…with the unsavory Vladimir Putin, butcher of Chechnyans, the reception of the African despot Robert Mugabe in Paris, public insults directed to Eastern European countries who committed the sin of not slavishly obeying us—our great nation is not in the process of writing its most glorious page in the Book of History.

The future of a liberated Iraq remains very problematic, and its pacification is far from certain. It is not certain…that the military conquest will be magically crowned with a harmony of hearts and spirits. There are no guarantees that the Bush administration, despite its promises, will seriously face the Palestinian question. Nor can we be certain that peace will win the day in the Middle East. However, by its choices, Paris has damned itself to having only a marginal role in this region of the world. History is progressing. Will France no longer be a part of it?