The Arrogance of Amphibians

In a visit to Britain Friday to try to improve relations between crumpet-eating mammals and spine-deprived amphibians, Jacques Chirac huffed:

"It's not for any given country to consider that a situation is open to stepping in and interfering," he told a question-and-answer session with students at Oxford University, according to the UK's Press Association in a sentence that either Chirac or the British has trouble translating into coherent English.

"It's up to the international community to do so and particularly the U.N., which alone has the authority to interfere," he said in remarks apparently aimed at the United States and its involvement in Iraq.

He went on to hold forth about the importance of dialogue between Europe and "the world's major poles" -- China, India, Brazil, Russia and various trading blocs according to CNN.

"For although our memory is sometimes short, the peoples submitted to the West's domination in the past have not forgotten and are quick to see a resurgence of imperialism and colonialism in our actions."

This would be presumably the same world whose United Nation's had Security Council members Russia, China, and France accepting lucrative bribes in the ongoing Oil-For-Food scandal with Saddam Hussein's Baathist Iraq. These five same Security Council members were understandably against any action against their revenue stream Iraq, and would have vetoed any military action by the United States against Saddam's regime.

So, Jacques Chirac, the President of France, is against the use of unilateral military force by Western powers, and thinks we should guard against actions that might be taken as resurgent colonialism?

I'm sure Ivory Coast appreciates that sentiment.

For those of you who can't keep up with African maps that change with more frequency than the bug splatter patterns on a NASCAR windscreen, Ivory Coast is a former French colony in the middle of a civil war that pits the dictatorial Laurent Gbagbo government against northern rebel forces.

On November 6 Gbagbo's forces launched an air strike against rebel positions, and nine French soldiers were killed in the attack, presumably while trying to surrender.

So France of course followed their own recommendations to the Americans, right?

They of course called an emergency session of the United Nations, where a timetable was arranged to start strategically applying increasingly stronger-worded resolutions over a multi-decade time period until Gbagbo died of boredom, or old age. That is what they have been telling us to do with Iraq for several years, so obviously that would the correct course of action in these kinds of circumstances, oui?

Well, someone apparently forgot to pass along the "timetable for peace" to the French military, as their response to the killing of their handful of peacekeepers was to wipe out the Ivory Coast Air Force.

This overkill response led to outrage among Gbagbo's government loyalists, and the French have now found themselves in a situation where they are being blamed for shooting into a crowd of anti-French demonstrators, killing over 60. As tensions escalate in an impending showdown in Africa, one can only assume that Jacques Chirac was either a complete fraud in his call for sanctions in Iraq, or he was simply too arrogant to think that his advocacy of a world authority would actually apply to him.

Unlike the video of the American Marine shooting a terrorist in Fallujah, this story is getting swept under the rug by the international media. The AP, Reuters, and other news agencies seem to be ignoring the story entirely, and the BBC makes no mention of the video and focuses more on the French denial of beheading victims.

The international apathy to French attrocities is appalling. Of course, we've seen French "diplomacy" in action before.