Mr. Lileks eviscerates Mr. Moore's latest bit of dementia.

Again, the high-school-level thinking: “the rest of the world.” It’s simplistic to identify Iran, Iraq and North Korea as evil. It’s simplistic to state in the immediate wake of 9/11 that nations are either with the terrorists, or the United States. But it’s a sign of complex nuanced thinking to say that “the rest of the world . . . looks at us with disdain and disgust.” Yes, the world poured out its heart; it cost them nothing. Hearts are easily tipped and just as easily refilled. When the French newspaper said “We are all Americans now” it sounded nice, and I suppose it was, but in retrospect it looks as if there was an undercurrent of appeasement and surrender: we are all Americans because we are all victims in a sense, non? We ceased to earn the precious coin of French approval when we fired the chief procurer for their favorite customer, Iraq. C’est dommage. We can live with it.

Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui.

Enjoy.

What amazes me is why anyone would ever think the French or the Russians ever really were our friends in the first place.

Why act surprised now?

When the French get boomed I will say I am sorry this happend and can I help, but I will NEVER say I am a Frenchman now.

Wow, that was a GREAT Lileks blog entry. A must read for everyone.

--Fred

Yet another good demonstration that throwing out simple one line statistical references never proves anything. I can't stand the references like 1 in 5 people wipe for forward instead of backwards or the someone in the U.S. trips over their own shoe laces every 23 seconds type of stats. The worst offenders in my opinion are M.A.D.D. with their off the wall DUI statistics.

Great fisking by Lileks who hits another homerun.

Of course, those lucky French, they've never lost airliners to Islamic terrorists, or had to deal with hijacked planes being flown at national landmarks or...

... oh! But they have.

The French deal with things in their own way. The mistake is assuming that they don't deal with things in the end.

Yeah, this is all well and good, we all hate the French, but it p**sses me off that I followed Bush into this war snickering and mocking the French--and the rest of the world--only to prove ourselves wrong on the whole issue of containment. It was working, people; the man had no W.M.D.'s. The regime would have collapsed with time--just as the Soviet Union did. Reagan was right on the money there--hedge them in, apply pressure, and bit by bit the regime dissolved. Yes, Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people--in the 1980s. Seems he couldn't have done that in 2003 even if he had wanted to. And now we've sacrificed 900 lives, and 100+ billion dollars, at a time when we can't afford it, to prove that fact to the world.

Why does this not make more conservatives angry? Believe me, there is nothing I would have loved more than to have waved a few chemical weapons in the colective French face and said, SEE!?? There is nothing I would have loved more than for the families of our war dead to see those giant nukes aimed right at us being dismantled and destroyed forever. But we can't. And that, to me, is the bottom line. I've changed my mind about Bush--and I won't let him waffle on this issue.