Poor, beleagured France! All they’re trying to do in West Africa is to keep the peace and impose some semblance of order.
“A rebel group in the Ivory Coast has accused France of waging war after a battle with French troops who are trying to maintain a truce in the country’s civil war.”
Meanwhile, the EU Commission in Brussels has denounced French unilateralism. The country’s ‘intellectuals’ are doing nothing except sneer at their leaders ‘simplisme’ foreign policy. The UN has passed a resolution condemning French aggression. Church leaders are urging the French to be more tolerant and understanding. Thousands of left-wing academics and celebrities have launched a ‘Not In My Name’ Petition. African leaders are calling upon the rest of the world to resist French militarism and both the Guardian and the Independent are running editorial columns focussing on France’s right-wing, red-necked President, their dangerous and uncivilised obsession with gun-culture and the danger that their blind, one-sided foreign policy represents to the rest of the world community.
Okay, none of those things have actually happened yet. But I’m quite sure they will. Any day now. You mark my words. Just wait and see.
It’s amazing that France has maintained a semblance of military competence.
Classic. Of course, as you surmise, none of those things will happen. Being Anti-French is so passé, don’t you know.
Poking fun at the French is one thing — they’re so quaintly pathétique, with their language laws and goat-cheese-on-baguette and little black berets and all. But hating France is right out.
Indeed, one would have to be a real wretch to think that it is a noble cause to malign and obstruct any nation trying to do the right thing, especially when they are sacrificing their men and finances (and weathering scorn) to do it.
Oh, wait…
Their Infantry has always been first class, especially the Foreign Legion, going back to WWI. It’s their political leadership that’s been a cluster fuck.
Note that as part of the French Community (similar to the British Commonwealth of former colonies), there’s a mutual defense pact with the Ivory Coast, signed in… 1960 or 1967, thereabouts, I can’t recall the exact date. Anyway, since the current civil war threatens the present government of Cote d’Ivoire, the French are obligated by their treaty (and some may say, as the former colonial government responsible for the current state of affairs) to intervene.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the French as much as the next guy (reference Rowan Atkinson’s brilliant “That’s Why I Hate the French”), but this situation isn’t exactly unilateralism or imperialism or the various -isms made up by anti-western complainers. Also note that when this latest round of violence started, the French soldiers actually helped a bunch of American students get out of the country safely.
John: The French are militarily competent against Africans.
Except, Benito, the entire origin of their intervention is in imperialism. It’s more imperialism than any of the US’s attacks. Not that it’s a bad thing– they’re doing a good thing here, the French.