Jacques Chirac tries on cowboy boots
(The Times excuses him as aging and addled.)
By Mark Kilmer Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
On Monday, French President Jacques Chirac had some reporters -- New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Le Nouvel Observateur -- over for pastries at the Élysée Palace.
On the matter of a nuclear armed Iran, here he went:
"I would say that what is dangerous about this situation is not the fact of having a nuclear bomb. Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that's not very dangerous."
Ahmadinejad and the mullahs with nukes doesn't fright us French folk! It must be his confidence in the power of diplomacy and negotiation.
But he added:
"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?" Chirac asked. "It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed."
Wow. If the Times had heard something similar, the threat to flatten Tehran, from George W. Bush, who would probably never say something so boneheaded, our media (mainstream) would break out in hives and begin a long, painful shriek.
"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Isreal?" That's no big deal, eh, Jacques? I mean, if they take out Tel Aviv, at least Paris still stands. Philippe Pétain, the prototypical surrender monkey, might be proud but surely Papa Joffre would scoff.
Never fear, though. Why hold Frenchie to his words?
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On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks.
Mr. Chirac said repeatedly during the second interview that he had spoken casually and quickly the day before because he believed he had been talking about Iran off the record.
“I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record,” he said.
Nope. The NYT describes the interview as "tape-recorded [and] on-the-record," with the only proviso being that it be held until Thursday. (If the President and the NYT had agreed to an interview on condition that it not be published for three days and the President had announced in the interview his intentions to flatten Tehran, you can be certain that they wouldn't have sat on it. And they shouldn't have.)
The NYT speculates about and frets over what Chirac might really feel and what he might really have meant to say, a bit of chicanery in which news reporters have no business engaging. And they report Chirac's further perfidy as if it were a trifle:
Élysée Palace prepared a heavily edited 19-page transcript of the Monday interview that excluded Mr. Chirac’s assessment of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The transcript even inserted a line that Mr. Chirac had not said that read, “I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran’s recourse to an atomic bomb.”
So Chirac is making stuff up. And why did Élysée have a transcript of what Chirac tried to insist was an off-the-record, informal chat?
Oh, never you fear. The NYT has the requisite sympathy for this wise, old anti-Bush stalwart:
Mr. Chirac, who is 74 and months away from ending his second term as president, suffered a neurological episode in 2005 and is said by French officials to have become much less precise in conversation.
There are no such excuses, there is no such sympathy for an American President, and my argument is not that there should be; rather, I would ask the NYT to report on Chirac in the same critical manner they employ when reporting on other public figures, foreign and domestic.
This was not just a few mistakes from an addled and confused world leader; the man just kept going:
Mr. Chirac also retracted his prediction that a nuclear Iran could encourage Saudi Arabia and Egypt to follow suit.
“I drifted — because I thought we were off the record — to say that, for example, Saudi Arabia or Egypt could be tempted to follow this example,” he said. “I retract it, of course, since neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt has made the slightest declaration on these subjects, so it is not up to me to make them.”
As for his suggestion in the first interview that Israel could be a target of an Iranian attack and could retaliate, Mr. Chirac said: “I don’t think I spoke about Israel yesterday. Maybe I did so but I don’t think so. I have no recollection of that.”
There were other clarifications. In the initial interview, for example, Mr. Chirac referred to the Iranian Islamic Republic as “a bit fragile.” In the subsequent interview, he called Iran “a great country” with a “very old culture” that “has an important role to play in the region” as a force for stability.
I daresay the French could use the services of Hank Waxman about now. They need a new President, and most certainly not their Jacques-Junior Prime Minister, the poet Dominique De Villepin, the one who traipsed around Africa in 2003 trying desperately to save Saddam's regime.
The genesis of the obstinate opposition to the war came from Jacques Chirac, ably aided by the poet de Villepin. From him came the Legion which has been dispersed into the American sheep.
Won't someone please hold that man accountable for something?
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Jacques Chirac tries on cowboy boots 4 Comments (0 topical, 4 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
to explode a nuclear device in Israel, as they can send it through the PA on wheels.
And a second or third device should bother the French more, if Iran indeed intends to use nuclear bombs to create electromagnetic pulses over western Europe or the US, which could easily be achieved if they put a bomb in low orbit, disguised as a satellite. I don't think the French would have an easy time with their share of the economic disaster that this would create.
(BTW, Jerome Corsi thinks he came up with the EMP idea first, but I used it as part of the premise of an unfinished novel I started in 1993.)
I think we should go easy on the French bashing; most of America can't wait to be a surrender monkey too. Monsieur Pot, meet Mr Kettle.
that the people want. There is a lot of projecting and outright lying going on with respect to the war in general and polls in particular.
The Academy: researching the Illiberal Arts
only when neither side is. In the case of Ahmadinejad, sanity is an open question.
"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?" Chirac asked. "It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed."
But Nancy and the Pelosicrats have Iran convinced that America doesn't have the will to roast marshmallows, much less raze Tehran.
And losing Tehran might even seem a small price to pay for taking out Tel Aviv. The Splodies blow themselves up every day just to take out a bus stop or farmer's market. Here's a chance to take out Israel's whole capital, for 72 virgins and a place in history.
I hope I'm wrong, of course, but only those without means should depend on hope.