2003-09-20

My dad sends me a link to a New York Times article: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,266162,00.html ’’Our War With France – It’s time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.’’

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,266162,00.html

Let it be known that I am half-French.

I am not hoping for failure of the US in Iraq. I just don’t feel like helping the US get out of trouble it rode itself into. At the same time, I am fearing that now that the real costs are being considered, the US will chicken out and then Iraq will have gotten all the bombs and none of the benefits. So clearly, helping the US is of no concern to me. Helping *Iraq*, however is a worthwile thing. The question is, then, how to best help *them*. Note that the question is now how to best help the US help Iraq. The answer to the question is not easy. If it were easy, we would have found it a long time ago.

Handing the government to the Iraqi people seems like an interesting first step.
Not supporting criminals (one of them wanted in Jordan, for example), crooks, power mongers and warlords is also a very good idea.
Fixing the infrastructure would also be clever. I just read today in the MondeDiplomatique that the US is not allowing the companies that installed the electricity networks (Siemens, ABB) and the phone networks (Alcatel) to fix them. Those companies are European.
New spending priorities would be a terrific idea. I just read in the MondeDiplomatique that the US spent USD 10 billion for their 9000 soldiers in Afghanistan and USD 0.6 billion in economic aid for the fiscal year 2003. Those priorities seem strange to me.

MondeDiplomatique

Spent the day strolling through town (again) with Claudia. Warm and sunny days, and love is in the air. ;) And now we’re going to see *Mais im Bundeshuus* (no IMDB number?). It turns out that it was sold out, and we watched *Spy Game* (IMDB:0266987) on DVD instead. It was ok.

IMDB:0266987

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Let’s compare

Bosnie: Lead by a french administrator for more than a year.
Afganisthan: no talks about an administrator there, an afghan “governement” is in place even before the war as ended
Iraqi: France position is to give the power to the iraqi asap, US thinks it’s not possible.

France “being so content with Saddam’s one-man rule”. Who gave weapons to saddam to fight Iran, who gave weapon to the taliban to fight russia? Who has the best relation with maroc, tunisia, egypt, who appointed lybia at the head of the human right commission? (Indeed who did this???) Any example of an an embargo, or even a word against a country lead by a friendly dictator, urging him for more democracy (perhaps a bit against turkey though)?

“forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run” Who has ever tried to support this forces? – PierreGaston 2003-09-22 6:53 UTC