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Guerre Mener N'est Que Dampnacion

By blueness

With two-thirds of his people opposing him, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is stubbornly increasing his commitment to George II's War on Terra, dispatching additional French troops to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Enduring Fiefdom.

In late August, France buried ten paratroopers ambushed and killed in Kabul province. The two-day battle that resulted in their deaths seems to have been something of a fiasco. One soldier told Le Monde that his unit was equipped only with assault weapons and that he and his fellows exhausted their ammunition during the attack. NATO commanders seem to have neglected to send reinforcements or provide air support. Confronted with charges that the slain French troops were too young and inexperienced, the French defense minister responded only that a professional army is "inevitably" composed of young soldiers. The Taliban commander who devised the ambush stated that but for the arrival of night, his men would have "killed every one of the [French] soldiers." Twenty-one French soldiers were wounded; eleven of the most gravely injured have been flown back to France.

The Afghan ambush was the costliest single military loss for France since 1983 . . . which also happens to be the last time the French rashly trotted at the heels of the US into an ill-advised Middle East conflict. On that occasion, 58 French soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a parking garage beneath the French barracks in West Beirut. Nearly simultaneously, 241 American Marines were killed in a similar suicide bombing at the American barracks at Beirut airport. Over the succeeding days, bodies had to be pulled out under sniper fire. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan turned tail and ran, withdrawing all US troops from Lebanon. A complete and total surrender conveniently forgotten whenever American righties commence their mendacious chants about US "retreats" in the face of "terrorism."
During the life of the Fifth Republic, France has prospered most when it has studiously steered a "Europe-first" course, eschewing entanglements with American overseas adventuring and recognizing that, in a post-colonial world, colonial projects, under whatever name, cannot, in the long run, succeed.

Sarkozy--like Napoleon, a foreign-born leader of France--seems intent on repeating the mistakes of England's Tony Blair, a man who snuggled up as lapdog to George II in a doomed, pathetic, loopy attempt to somehow raise from the dead his nation's "glory" days as imperial enforcer. Napoleon intended, eventually, to get around to extending a French presence into Afghanistan; Sarkozy, a Hungarian who spends entirely too much time ruminating upon the life and times of the "little Corsican," presumably figures better late than never.

French troops serve in Afghanistan under the aegis of NATO, which is absurd--NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is intended to "promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area." Afghanistan is nowhere near the North Atlantic. It is landlocked, and located in Central Asia. NATO's functional reason for being was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has been defunct since 1991, and has not bothered Afghanistan since 1989. In Afghanistan, as in most of the rest of the world that does not consist of NATO member countries, NATO is increasingly seen as what it clearly is: simply the most recent manifestation of "white people telling us what to do."

At least in Afghanistan the French have not behaved as badly as have the Germans--another NATO nation goosed into Operation Enduring Fiefdom by George II. Let loose again on the world stage, German gaulitiers just couldn't resist the impulse to immediately disinter their skulls and their swastikas and their smirking torture.

Still, Sarkozy's ill-considered embrace of Operation Enduring Fiefdom is jeopardizing the lives of French citizens. Under the previous regime, France provided only non-combat assistance in Afghanistan, and resolutely refused to become involved in George II's Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. With Israel's Mossad having self-immolated in a George II-style political putsch, French intelligence now produces (pace China) the most accurate intelligence on the Middle East; the French knew for a fact Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, as a member of Saddam's cabinet was on the French payroll (the French passed this man to the US, who didn't want to hear him). When, as a response to Operation Iraqi Fiefdom, Islamic extremists set out to punish George II enablers, like Spain and England, France was spared; spared too were French citizens captured in Iraq. The Sarkozy ever-cozier snuggle-up to George II in Afghanistan means inevitably that France and French citizens will be removed from the Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-influenced "do not disturb" zone.

The French people, sensibly, want nothing to do with Sarkozy's adventure in Afghanistan. When Paris Match published an eight-page photo spread of Taliban fighters posing before effects stripped from the ten slain French paratroopers, even the mother of one of the dead called on Sarkozy to end the senseless French presence in Afghanistan.

Earlier this week, the mother of another of the French paratroopers killed in the 18 August attack told the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that she had written a letter to Mr Sarkozy, begging him to get France out of the war.

"Stop following the example of President Bush," she wrote. "Let's stay French. Let's get our soldiers out of the quagmire."

Contrary to Sarkozy's apparent expectation, that the publication of the photographs--the first real mass exposure of French participation in the Afghan conflict--would excite bloodlust and a desire for revenge among the French, the Match spread seems instead to have sparked a country-wide desire to get the hell out.

Until then there had been little news coverage of the French mission, although some 3,000 of the country's troops are currently serving in Afghanistan.

But being confronted with full-page, glossy photographs of the insurgents who killed their troops is bound to rekindle arguments about what France's role in Afghanistan really is.

The French parliament has called for an urgent debate on the matter[.]

Jean Francois, a financial adviser, [said]: "This kind of report is horrible and unfair for the families. The French population can't accept to see any more soldiers killed. French soldiers have to come back to France as soon as possible."

They can be cruel, there in France. Currently, the speculation, in both the capital and the countryside, is over who shall desert Sarkozy first: his serenely omnisexual wife, or the French electorate.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).