Epoetker
April 10th 2003, 07:23 PM
http://www.canada.com/national/features/iraq/story.html?id={A60E3CF1-EEB1-46A6-9A83-1F2E7B015CAB}
I'll let Mark Steyn speak first:
Well, this whole quagmire seems to be getting worse, eh? I see the Yanks have now been reduced to staging fake scenes of supposed jubilation on the alleged streets of what the Pentagon assures us is Baghdad. If you pause the video, you'll see the guy on the right jumping up and down thwacking his shoe on the head of Saddam's toppled statue is actually Richard Perle disguised as an Iraqi cab driver and the woman standing next to him ululating "Blessings be upon you, o great Bush" is David Frum in a chador.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, is apparently taking a couple of days off to celebrate Iraq's official Mother Of All Victories weekend. On his last stand-up set, he insisted Saddam's army had the British and Americans on the run. "We are in control," he said. "They are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards." I knew he was doomed when he started talking like a Liberal backbencher.
It's surely only a matter of time before he's hired as Chrétien's press officer. "These are all lies that the Americans are annoyed with Canada! The whole world knows Washington is terrified of our great leader and quakes before his heroic display of principles and sovereignty! America is our best friend and neighbour and if they dare say otherwise we will crush them like the Zionist tools they are! The 49th parallel is littered with the burnt-out shells of their tanks, those bastards!"
My favourite vignette from yesterday? The sack of the UN HQ in Baghdad. Hey, Jacques, with all those missing filing cabinets, we're gonna have to give inspections even longer to work.
Oh, dear. I fear this column is getting bogged down in a gloating quagmire. Let us turn instead to the shape of the post-war world. Watching that statue of Saddam topple just before 7 p.m. Iraqi time yesterday, one understood immediately that here was the great symbolic image of this war -- the one that they'll be playing in the TV news round-ups of the year, and the decade. The only question is: What precisely does the great symbolic image symbolize? Is it the Middle Eastern equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an act that rippled across half a continent? Or is it something smaller, more contained, a crack in the ice but the hard face of the rest of the lake remains frozen? You could hear the bafflement in the coverage of the Arab state TV networks as their reporters struggled to explain the pictures of joyous Iraqis cheering the first western troops to march in to occupy a major Middle Eastern city since General Allenby took Jerusalem for the British 85 years ago. Like that event, this week's images mark the start of an epochal, transformational shift.
That kind of talk unnerves some people, if only because the present arrangements suit them quite nicely. Bookending the liberation of Baghdad are two summits -- Bush and Blair in Belfast on Monday, Chirac and Schroeder and Putin in Moscow on Friday. It's nice to have the choices put so plainly: on the one hand, the Coalition of the Willing; on the other, the Coalition of the Willing To Go On Selling Saddam Nuclear Reactors In Exchange For Oil Concessions For Another Decade Or Three No Matter How Many People He Kills. The French mock the "coalition of the willing" as "les Anglo-Saxons," and if that's the best insult they can come up with I'll take it. Nothing new about this: in Eastern Europe in the Eighties, Thatcher and Reagan were the heroes, not Mitterrand and Schmidt. Liberated peoples are rarely grateful to those who found it more convenient to keep them in prison. "Anglo-Saxon" may be a sneer in France and Belgium, not in Eastern Europe.
So tomorrow's meeting of the Coalition of the Irrelevant will be of interest only for students of the terminal stages of M. Chirac's Gallic hauteur. All three men seem imprisoned by their pasts -- Chirac the seedy fixer, Schroeder the Sixties peacenik, Putin the KGB hardman. Kofi Annan has already figured it's best to steer clear: When the Iraqis are in the streets waving posters of Bush and playing soccer with the Brits it's not the best time for a photo op with Dominique de Villepin.
Since "Anglo-Saxon" is the preferred French shorthand for the Bush-Blair view of the world, we may as well keep things simple and designate the Chiraquiste alternative as "French." The "Anglo-Saxon" view -- the Bush Doctrine -- thinks that liberty will do for the Middle East what it's done for Eastern Europe and Latin America. The "French" view is that it's much easier if relations with the world's dictators are managed by a sleazy transnational elite. If M. Chirac and M. de Villepin and TotalFinaElf can live with Saddam, why can't the Iraqis live with Saddam, 24/7, forever and ever?
In the last year, we all had plenty of time to make our choices. Eastern Europe chose "Anglo-Saxon." The British and American left voted "French": in the Sixties, the peaceniks thought the Communists would transform South Vietnam into an agrarian utopia; this time round, it didn't bother going through the motions of even rhetorical progressivism -- they marched to keep the Iraqi people in chains, and they were happy to do so. A week ago, a European poll revealed that a third of the French people wanted Saddam to win the war. If he makes it out from under that rubble with his moustache intact and manages to hop a fishing smack to Marseilles, maybe he should try running for a seat in the National Assembly.
And Canada? We voted French, finally and decisively, and in defiance of our own history. Indeed, at times M. Chrétien was plus Chirac que Chirac. With exquisite timing, the Prime Minister waited till after the Americans had won before announcing he wanted the Americans to win.
France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of Baghdad make that plain. But we are on the side of TotalFinaElf. Twice in recent columns, Diane Francis has mentioned, almost en passant, a curious little fact:
The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter."
Let's see if I've got this straight: TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp, whose co-chief executive is Jean Chrétien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais. Mr. Desmarais' brother, Paul Desmarais Jr., sits on the Total board.
For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil," that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oilpatch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian Prime Minister -- that's to say, his daughter, France Chrétien, and his grandchildren.
What a delightful footnote to the Chrétien-Chiraquiste war effort. This is a victory not just for the Iraqi people but for "Anglo-Saxon" reality over Franco-Canadian postmodern cynicism.
Also, you probably knew a site like this would come up:
www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com
I'll let Mark Steyn speak first:
Well, this whole quagmire seems to be getting worse, eh? I see the Yanks have now been reduced to staging fake scenes of supposed jubilation on the alleged streets of what the Pentagon assures us is Baghdad. If you pause the video, you'll see the guy on the right jumping up and down thwacking his shoe on the head of Saddam's toppled statue is actually Richard Perle disguised as an Iraqi cab driver and the woman standing next to him ululating "Blessings be upon you, o great Bush" is David Frum in a chador.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, is apparently taking a couple of days off to celebrate Iraq's official Mother Of All Victories weekend. On his last stand-up set, he insisted Saddam's army had the British and Americans on the run. "We are in control," he said. "They are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards." I knew he was doomed when he started talking like a Liberal backbencher.
It's surely only a matter of time before he's hired as Chrétien's press officer. "These are all lies that the Americans are annoyed with Canada! The whole world knows Washington is terrified of our great leader and quakes before his heroic display of principles and sovereignty! America is our best friend and neighbour and if they dare say otherwise we will crush them like the Zionist tools they are! The 49th parallel is littered with the burnt-out shells of their tanks, those bastards!"
My favourite vignette from yesterday? The sack of the UN HQ in Baghdad. Hey, Jacques, with all those missing filing cabinets, we're gonna have to give inspections even longer to work.
Oh, dear. I fear this column is getting bogged down in a gloating quagmire. Let us turn instead to the shape of the post-war world. Watching that statue of Saddam topple just before 7 p.m. Iraqi time yesterday, one understood immediately that here was the great symbolic image of this war -- the one that they'll be playing in the TV news round-ups of the year, and the decade. The only question is: What precisely does the great symbolic image symbolize? Is it the Middle Eastern equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an act that rippled across half a continent? Or is it something smaller, more contained, a crack in the ice but the hard face of the rest of the lake remains frozen? You could hear the bafflement in the coverage of the Arab state TV networks as their reporters struggled to explain the pictures of joyous Iraqis cheering the first western troops to march in to occupy a major Middle Eastern city since General Allenby took Jerusalem for the British 85 years ago. Like that event, this week's images mark the start of an epochal, transformational shift.
That kind of talk unnerves some people, if only because the present arrangements suit them quite nicely. Bookending the liberation of Baghdad are two summits -- Bush and Blair in Belfast on Monday, Chirac and Schroeder and Putin in Moscow on Friday. It's nice to have the choices put so plainly: on the one hand, the Coalition of the Willing; on the other, the Coalition of the Willing To Go On Selling Saddam Nuclear Reactors In Exchange For Oil Concessions For Another Decade Or Three No Matter How Many People He Kills. The French mock the "coalition of the willing" as "les Anglo-Saxons," and if that's the best insult they can come up with I'll take it. Nothing new about this: in Eastern Europe in the Eighties, Thatcher and Reagan were the heroes, not Mitterrand and Schmidt. Liberated peoples are rarely grateful to those who found it more convenient to keep them in prison. "Anglo-Saxon" may be a sneer in France and Belgium, not in Eastern Europe.
So tomorrow's meeting of the Coalition of the Irrelevant will be of interest only for students of the terminal stages of M. Chirac's Gallic hauteur. All three men seem imprisoned by their pasts -- Chirac the seedy fixer, Schroeder the Sixties peacenik, Putin the KGB hardman. Kofi Annan has already figured it's best to steer clear: When the Iraqis are in the streets waving posters of Bush and playing soccer with the Brits it's not the best time for a photo op with Dominique de Villepin.
Since "Anglo-Saxon" is the preferred French shorthand for the Bush-Blair view of the world, we may as well keep things simple and designate the Chiraquiste alternative as "French." The "Anglo-Saxon" view -- the Bush Doctrine -- thinks that liberty will do for the Middle East what it's done for Eastern Europe and Latin America. The "French" view is that it's much easier if relations with the world's dictators are managed by a sleazy transnational elite. If M. Chirac and M. de Villepin and TotalFinaElf can live with Saddam, why can't the Iraqis live with Saddam, 24/7, forever and ever?
In the last year, we all had plenty of time to make our choices. Eastern Europe chose "Anglo-Saxon." The British and American left voted "French": in the Sixties, the peaceniks thought the Communists would transform South Vietnam into an agrarian utopia; this time round, it didn't bother going through the motions of even rhetorical progressivism -- they marched to keep the Iraqi people in chains, and they were happy to do so. A week ago, a European poll revealed that a third of the French people wanted Saddam to win the war. If he makes it out from under that rubble with his moustache intact and manages to hop a fishing smack to Marseilles, maybe he should try running for a seat in the National Assembly.
And Canada? We voted French, finally and decisively, and in defiance of our own history. Indeed, at times M. Chrétien was plus Chirac que Chirac. With exquisite timing, the Prime Minister waited till after the Americans had won before announcing he wanted the Americans to win.
France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of Baghdad make that plain. But we are on the side of TotalFinaElf. Twice in recent columns, Diane Francis has mentioned, almost en passant, a curious little fact:
The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter."
Let's see if I've got this straight: TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp, whose co-chief executive is Jean Chrétien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais. Mr. Desmarais' brother, Paul Desmarais Jr., sits on the Total board.
For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil," that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oilpatch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian Prime Minister -- that's to say, his daughter, France Chrétien, and his grandchildren.
What a delightful footnote to the Chrétien-Chiraquiste war effort. This is a victory not just for the Iraqi people but for "Anglo-Saxon" reality over Franco-Canadian postmodern cynicism.
Also, you probably knew a site like this would come up:
www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com