News from Wallace House Archives
From the Head Fellow: Those Awful French and Their American Position
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75When something like the Iraqi crisis looms, people ask if I don't itch to be back near the "bang-bang." The answer is no, although with the "shock and awe" of new technology and Pentagon inclusiveness, battlefields do make irresistible television. Mayhem never interested me much beyond the adrenalin involved. The actual fighting in conflicts I covered for Time in Biafra, Northern Ireland, during the early stages of the "Dirty War" in Argentina and the gory coup that toppled Chile's Salvador Allende struck me as glorified police stories.
War issues, however, are always fascinating. Unlike bang-bang, they reveal the full panoply of reasons our species gives for dismembering one another. The difference is like that between Sands of Iwo Jima and The Quiet American. As I write this 24th day of March, 2003, the spectacular immediacy of battlefield coverage blots out the very unspectacular coverage of how we went to war.
"The War." For six months before the fighting, that's what everyone called it despite the demonstrable absence of war. Is perception of inevitability a management tool in statecraft? Machiavelli thought so. It is THE management tool, although that was discussed neither during the run up to invasion nor afterwards, when the administrations of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein both availed themselves of it. Is there really an "old Europe" led by France? If so, it espouses the restraint and multilateralism the U.S. favored for 227 years, ending last fall. The position is now parodied, vilified and condemned as if France had invented something astonishingly new!
Just for reminders, the closest thing to a "special relationship" the U.S. enjoyed until Britain began losing World War II was with France, without whose troops and fleet there would have been no British surrender at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War. Winston Churchill coined the term when he needed a special friend—a big one.
In recent weeks the best journalism joined the worst in an orgy of name-calling inspired by, but hardly limited to, two traditional sources of American humor: cartoons and Congress. The French, according to "The Simpsons," are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." French fried potatoes in the House of Representatives cafeteria are now called "freedom fries." More broadly, our media explained that the French are awful because they are:
- Deluded by an insatiable desire to be "distinct." True but irrelevant. Nobody wants to be more distinct than Americans.
- Trying to counterbalance a superpower. True again, but hardly new and certainly not a complete explanation for France picking a fight with its most important ally.
- Unreliable. Sometimes, but then so are we; just ask the Kurds. Also, please recall that because of U.S. military censorship, many of the tanks shown streaking towards Baghdad in 1991 were French.
Nowhere have I found even a hint that French behavior might be as rational as, say, our own. Okay, I'm a confessed Francophile. One result of a stint as Paris correspondent is a permanent friendship of a particularly French sort, with an American-trained international banker who 30 years ago was my best source on the mysteries of his country. Nothing has changed. His contacts are impeccable and go right to the top. Even better (and something unknown here) he adds the perspective of a family that has kept track of itself for 1,000 years, which is neither a misprint or exaggeration, nor an irrelevant detail. To Frenchmen like him, what the U.S. is projecting looks a lot like a Crusade-such as the one to the Middle East that bankrupted my friend's family on his mother's side in the 12th century. As our countries drifted apart in recent weeks, my friend and I resumed an old habit of regular conversations specifically on world issues—a sort of seminar, Sundays at noon, Ann Arbor time.
Naturally, we've been talking war and, as is common, he has hit me with a thought I hadn't come across anywhere else-although it certainly would have illuminated American reporting. He had recently spent an evening with one of the most influential figures in French security circles. What are people like that discussing?
Oh, that post-war France has become nearly 10 percent Muslim, numbering about 5.5 million and severely limiting political and diplomatic options. As in so many things, the danger zones of U.S. and French cities are mirror images of one another: our black ghettos are their seething Muslim suburbs. Because of well-founded charges of discrimination, immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa form an angry minority feared by other Frenchmen the way white Americans fear the black underclass. In representative democracies, guilts, fears and numbers count. The French Jewish community, of 700,000, far smaller than the Muslim, keeps a profile far lower than its U.S. counterpart, and French electoral politics do not depend on fundraising. If you want to understand what participation in an unprovoked invasion of a Muslim nation looked like to French politicians, think of what cutting off U.S. aid to Israel, or a forcible American eviction of Jewish settlers from the West Bank, might mean in the next presidential election.
I am not arguing that the Muslim factor entirely explains French diplomacy nor that the position itself is superior to our own. I'm talking journalism here. It is simply a painful amazement to realize the extent to which platitudes, stereotypes and general official blah dumbed down the questions asked about an old ally. It's not only the French who deserve better American coverage of France.
