Punishing France for its principles
A recent spate of articles tell me that France is to be punished for not toeing the line on the war in Iraq.
BBC: US seeks to sideline France
NYT: U.S. Officials Consider Ways to Punish France [free registration required]
Guardian Unlimited: France will pay for war stance, Powell says
Pardon me for asking, but since when is it the place of the United States to arbitrarily punish other sovereign nations for doing what they have a right to do?
The reasoning seems to be that, because France did not support Bush’s war, it should be excluded from playing a role in, well, just about anything significant from now on. Is Germany to be punished as well? Russia? China? Most of the rest of the world?
By that same token, am I to be excluded from voting against Bush in 2004 as punishment for my resistance?
“We did not believe they played a helpful role,” Powell said. That is because the whole situation leading up to the war--including the incredibly flimsy “evidence” you proffered at the U.N.--was wrong, Colin. (How’s that rock-solid intelligence holding up these days, anyway? Seems like it wasn’t as good as you claimed.) You cannot expect a government with even a shred of integrity to accept such a contrived casus belli.
Not that I can blame Powell for the fiasco at the U.N. (though some certainly do) when it was clearly Bush’s fault for not giving diplomacy an honest chance. I once believed that Powell was a good man, but I believe that no longer.
It’s a shame really, because Powell was the only redeemable person in the Bush administration. Now there are none. And the world will pay for the failures of these fools who run our country.
[Aside: You know, I’m really not as much of a political geek as I might seem, but the Bush administration simply astounds me with how awful it is. I didn’t care much for the first president Bush, or Reagan before him, but I would never have written so much about either of those presidents as I have about this one. I can honestly say that I utterly despise everything this administration stands for. That’s a first for me, which is why I tend to dwell on this subject so much. Sorry!]
A lot of people around our nation are somewhat… disappointed by the U.S. government.\r
I was raised by the belief, that the U.S. (though not alone) has brought democracy back to our nation when times were desperate and was always ready to help other nations in similar cases (although in for gods sake smaler scales).\r
We believed in the strength of the U.S.A., the strength of the will to share freedom with the whole world. Now I have to reconsider all I have learned about the way the U.S. treads foreign affairs. Pacifying - what a word!\r
This may seem naive or pathetic to you, but we also build our nation on a lot of believes taught to us across the atlantic ocean.\r
We, that is our people and our media, try to see through this in an unemotional way but I have read a lot of articles recently that show me, that the citizens of the U.S. are beeing blinded by their government in an sadly similar way than our people in the 30’s of the last century.\r
We have had a great deal of experience in assaults on other nations for reasons a sane person could not realy understand.\r
I just hope the citizens of the United States of America, along with all those who favor the acting government, do not the same mistakes that were made back then by the “Führer” and his companions - maybe some sort of cold war will rise again then.\r
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Sorry for comparing the situation to the beginning of the second world war, but I have to see this in a sort of “worst-case” thing, it helps me hoping that you see what could happen if this insanity doesn’t stop soon.\r
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So, it is interesting for me to see how you see things, from one person to another, not through the hands of the media.\r
And I hope my comment will help you too, seeing things from the outside.
It is a sad state of affairs when the nation who received the Statue of Liberty from the French, now villify them for their stance against oppression. The jury is still out on whether the outcome of the US-led war in Iraq will be positive or not (leaving aside the legality of the action itself and the motivations behind it). How sad that the friendhip and shared values of the past seem now to have been forgotton. Has France changed its stance, or has the US changed?
I believe that the U.S. has changed--quite radically, I’m afraid--under Bush’s leadership. We have abandoned principles in favor of cliquishness and cronyism, as illustrated by the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” that now seeks to exclude nations like France from the effort to rebuild Iraq.\r
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France, for all its own problems (and I do acknowledge problems with France’s position, but they are not the ones for which it is being derided in Washington), is guilty only of not being persuaded by fabricated evidence, of not buying a pretext for war that was based on lies.
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