No they are not. For a start, my recollection is that the insults began on the US side, with Rumsfeld's cretinous distinction between "old Europe" and "new Europe", the "new Europe" being represented, if you please, by Berlusconi. This was not only a deliberate insult to two major allies, delivered in public by a major member of the US administration - the Secretary of State for Defence - it was also quite incredibly uncomprehending. The truth was that even those European governments - Spain, Poland, Britain, Italy - which did originally support the American initiative, did so because it was an American intiative. I mean that it would have occurred to no Pole, Italian, Spaniard or Briton that their governments, were they led only by their own perceptions and interests, would have even began to think of invading any Arab state. In the eyes of everyone, this was an American war; therefore, to insult France and Germany for being too gutless and decadent to fight it was not only stupid, it was an affront to their sovereignty. It was the master calling the slave lazy and stupid for not jumping at the master's command. I recall being utterly astonished that Rumsfeld kept his job after that outburst - and for three disastrous years after. And I would like it pointed out to me where Chirac ever made a statement half as demeaning towards America as Rumsfeld's was towards France and Germany. And Rumsfeld's statement, being unpunished, set the tone; from then on, in the American right, it was open season on France. So France retaliated; I would have been surprised had they not.
What is more, the French and European objection was not necessarily to war as such. It was to the notion of invading and occupying an Arab country. As everyone knows, all western secret services, certainly including the French and German ones, were convinced that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Their point was simply that to invade and occupy an Arab country was to ask for trouble. And I remember saying, at the time, that the Americans will only succeed in this war if, within a year from victory, they will have withdrawn from Iraq; otherwise, I said, their whole army of occupation will become nothing but the biggest body of hostages in recorded history, there to be assaulted and murdered by the locals. When I saw the incredibly fumbling early steps of the occupation, I expected the worst - at least, the worst I could imagine (even my imagination did not stretch to monsters hideous enough to repeatedly massacre their own fellow-countrymen merely in order to make the occupation harder for the enemy). So tell me I was wrong; tell me that Bush did not go into this military adventure with criminal light-headedness; tell me that he did not deserve, whether or not Chirac applied it to him, the epithet of a warmongering, empty-headed space cadet. There is no evidence whatever that the Americans had any plan at all for the after-Saddam. And just exactly because the French have some considerable experience of intervention in foreign countries, they ought to have been listened to in this. Their intervention in Africa is always to support existing government or to put specific and clearly identified parties in power. This may be hypocritical, but it is less criminally inept than to march into an Arab country and expect a finished democratic government to drop from heaven.
Re: I'll leave you and <lj user = kulibali> to argue this out
What is more, the French and European objection was not necessarily to war as such. It was to the notion of invading and occupying an Arab country. As everyone knows, all western secret services, certainly including the French and German ones, were convinced that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Their point was simply that to invade and occupy an Arab country was to ask for trouble. And I remember saying, at the time, that the Americans will only succeed in this war if, within a year from victory, they will have withdrawn from Iraq; otherwise, I said, their whole army of occupation will become nothing but the biggest body of hostages in recorded history, there to be assaulted and murdered by the locals. When I saw the incredibly fumbling early steps of the occupation, I expected the worst - at least, the worst I could imagine (even my imagination did not stretch to monsters hideous enough to repeatedly massacre their own fellow-countrymen merely in order to make the occupation harder for the enemy). So tell me I was wrong; tell me that Bush did not go into this military adventure with criminal light-headedness; tell me that he did not deserve, whether or not Chirac applied it to him, the epithet of a warmongering, empty-headed space cadet. There is no evidence whatever that the Americans had any plan at all for the after-Saddam. And just exactly because the French have some considerable experience of intervention in foreign countries, they ought to have been listened to in this. Their intervention in Africa is always to support existing government or to put specific and clearly identified parties in power. This may be hypocritical, but it is less criminally inept than to march into an Arab country and expect a finished democratic government to drop from heaven.