9-11 and getting help from the French

Fernando Vigón's extraordinary comment -- clear, knowledgable, detailed and well-argued -- rightly points out the role of post-colonial Islamic national politics in development of Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism. Equally important, he reminds us that the failure of the Middle peace negotiations has been attributed to Arafat and not the Clinton Administration, which did a laudable job guiding the negotiations to agreement before Arafat reneged on the accord.

Why then do I insist on the U.S's moral standing and our responsibility for stopping terrorism? To start with, the boss is always responsible for what happens. If things don't work, then it is the boss's job to fix it. It the boss's hired hand can not fix things, then a new hired hand should be contracted. Successive U.S. Presidents have done a bad job defending our competitive advantages: moral standing, economic superiority, and cultural imperialism.

When I speak of U.S. "moral standing" it is comparative. In an awful world, the United States pre-Iraq was borderline decent, weilding astonishing power with relative gentleness. Few world leaders are sanguine about possible replacements for the U.S. at the world's most powerful nation. Doubters can ask diplomats if their countries's leaders are happy about the rise of China. And so I return to my already outworn line: "If you think we are S.O.B.'s wait until the Chinese run the world." (I expect China's military spending to equal or surpass the U.S. before 2025 years.)

During much of the 20th-century the U.S. was "a beacon on a hill". Following Vietnam, we became tepid and lax in our foreign policy and in defending American values. We ceded manufacturing leadership to Japan, buckled to OPEC pressure, began borrowing from the Chinese, step by step making ourselves vulnerable. With the election of George W. Bush, it was expected that the U.S. would retreat from interational involvements; President Bush's limited international experience and apparent indifference spelled a further retreat from leadership, and yet another blow to the U.S.'s moral standing.

Then came 9-11 and refocused the world on the need for U.S. moral, cultural, and political leadership. The Bush Administration failed miserably, and the world is worse place because of it.

Perhaps the U.S. ally that best understood what was at stake was France, not Great Britain. The French, including French intellectual critics of the U.S. like Beaudrillard, have pleaded for decades for the Americans to recoup their proper role in world affairs. Even Villepin denouncing the pending Iraq War as "immoral" was a plea for America to do its job and not a rejection of the United States.

Ever since de Toqueville, the French have been obsessed with the surviving partner in the political and social experiment we call democracy. The French revolution came to ruin and Napoleon, the French ceded to the British and then the German; and then, in the 20th century, the French became famous for their intellectuals and for philosphical downers like existentialism and deconstruction.

As the French sunk into the "thinking" that Sarkozy has rejected, American philosophy in the 19th and 20th century gave the world the transcendentalism of Emerson and the pragmatism of James and Dewey. America joined romanticism and reason in a philosophy of positive action that conquered the world. America's leadership could be crude and simple, it was sometimes puerile, but for more than a century it gave the world for the first time a society in which equality of opportunity meant something close to a fair chance for everyone. On this, the U.S. built its moral standing, powered its economic jaggernaut, and sold its life and culture worldwide.

I doubt that George Bush has given this much thought any more than he understands the French passion for the "exception culturelle". America conquered the world morally, economically and culturally, binding all this together in a world view that was optimistic, sometimes simplistic, sometimes overbearing, but true to itself. When we stopped being "American" and we started on the road to paranoic self-righteousness, we took to grandstanding (one of Bush's favorite tactics) and torture. In short, we turned from basic to base. The road back may not be easy.

Perhaps Sarkozy, the part-immigrant, the pragmatist who thinks the French thinks too much, who wants to be more French than the French, has figured it out. Maybe he can take George W. out on a ride to the Statue of Liberty and remind him why the French gave it us.

Comments

[Fernando Vigon]

Mon cher David en parlant de la France tu as touché un point sensible chez moi.

It’s funny but whenever we raised the issue of foreign policy, especially Middle East, there is a penchant (French word by the way) for naming France in comparison with the “damned” USA policies.

Of course everybody forgets that in June 1967, when the Israeli Air Force obliterated its Egyptians and Syrians counterparts 100 % of Israeli planes were of French origin (Mirage III, Ouragan, Vatour, Mystere) or that it was French nuclear technology that provided Israeli scientist with the know how to develop atomic bombs in the Dimona nuclear facilities and led them to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
By the way, it was a USA President who kicked British and French out of Egypt in 1956, Eisenhower wasn’t it? (Remember the Nasser’s Suez crisis).

You mentioned Dominique de Villepin comments denouncing the pending Iraq War as "immoral". Right you score one, but what do you make of the destruction of the Greenpeace anti-nuclear ship, Rainbow Warrior, by French undercover agents in a New Zealand harbour which cost a Portuguese photographer his life in 1985?

What about torture? Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib ….and la bataille d’Alger 1957. Do you remember who the Minister of Justice of the French Government was while the “paras” were fighting the FLN in the streets of Alger? Yes, you are right, François Mitterrand, the same President who ordered to blow up the Rainbow Warrior. See Gillo Pontecorvo’s film or any of the thousands of books written about it.

It is risky business to use France as an example: L’ Oréal, AXA, LVMH are top players in the world market, but at the same time the France’s state debt has more than doubled since 1990, high unemployment, cheminots, 35 hours working week and the best French brains working in Sylicon valley, Massachusetts and London. You have INSEAD and HEC but also the well-known and hated Ecole Nationale d’Administration. A lot of work to catch up with for Nicolas Sarkozy.

Is the USA becoming an empire with a network of military bases spreading throughout the world? Perhaps, but France has been playing the same role ….but in Africa and to tell the truth as it is the case with USA, sometimes successfully, Kolwezi 1978.

L’exception française means that when we talk about the French Revolution the words “liberté, égalité, fraternité “come to the fore, but everybody forgets about the hundred of thousand killed in the wake of it, Vendée, Napoleonic Wars……

Mon cher David, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t use France as a yardstick.