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The French Spin a
Different War Story
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Posted April 17, 2003 - Issue:
04/29/03
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The news had been bad from the start.
U.S. and British troops were "bogged down"
in southern Iraq in the face of "fierce
resistance" from Iraqi forces loyal to
Saddam Hussein. U.S. supply lines had been
cut, and an ambush by cunning Iraqi
defenders had killed dozens of U.S.
troops. American prisoners of war, shown
on French television in footage that was
withheld in the United States, seemed
pitiably small, helpless and afraid. U.S.
helicopters were crashing like mosquitoes
hitting a bug zapper, and a U.S. Patriot
missile had shot down a British warplane
in a friendly-fire incident that risked
alienating public opinion in Great
Britain, America's only ally in this
go-it-alone war.
By the end of the week, French media
pundits concluded, the blitzkrieg promised
by President George W. Bush and his
advisers had become a "quagmire."
Civilians were being massacred by
trigger-happy U.S. troops committing war
crimes. Antiwar protests around the world
showed how "isolated" America was, while
protesters in the United States were
calling for "regime change" in Washington
rather than Baghdad.
The average Frenchman listening to
state-run France Inter radio or Antenne 2
television during the first week of the
war in Iraq saw the United States
spiraling toward a humiliating defeat, and
Bush, the "cowboy" president, headed for
ignominy if not impeachment. In tones that
mixed elation and awe, newsmen and pundits
began speculating on how the Middle East
would look the day after the United States
lost the war against Saddam. Wouldn't this
dramatic display of U.S. vulnerability
encourage other nations and terrorist
groups to challenge overrated U.S.
military might?
Most striking in the French coverage
was the total absence of any criticism of
government policy, or of President Jacques
Chirac - a president who squeaked past
voters in the first round of last year's
elections with a little more than 18
percent of the vote, neck and neck with
extreme-right leader Jean-Marie LePen. In
normal times the opposition Socialist
Party would have been all over Chirac, and
France's lively opinion journals would
have skewered his policies from all sides.
But the French war coverage was not merely
one-sided, it was viciously inaccurate and
openly anti-American. Propaganda is too
polite a term for the type of deliberate
brainwashing conducted by the official
state media. This reporter has seen
nothing like it in 18 years of covering
France.
If you were French and listened
exclusively to France's state-run media,
you never would have known that the United
States and Britain had been joined by 40
other nations in a coalition to disarm
Iraq and oust the regime of Saddam Hussein
because the media failed to report it. You
would have missed the fact that nearly a
dozen Arab nations supported the war -
with many of them allowing coalition
forces to use their airfields, ports and
territory as staging areas - because the
news focused exclusively on the anger of
the Arab "street." You would never have
known that the American public
overwhelmingly supported President Bush
and the war, nor would you have understood
that the administration planned to use
Iraq's oil resources for the benefit of
the Iraqi people to rebuild Iraq. You
would have thought the United States was
isolated, its president a dangerous
lunatic and the administration full of
greedy oil barons who were set on world
domination for personal and corporate
profit.
In the final days before hostilities
began, for instance, the Radio France
flagship station France Inter ran an
hourlong special program devoted to the
"antiwar" movement in Britain and the
United States. "Let's listen to other
voices from Great Britain and the United
States," the show's host announced on
March 18. He then claimed that the war was
rejected overwhelmingly by U.S. and
British intellectuals such as 91-year-old
playwright Arthur Miller and British
thriller writer John le Carré. "In
the United States, they are afraid of
these people and prevent them from
speaking," the host confided.
"This war with Iraq that George Bush
has started ..."
"Is even worse than Vietnam," le
Carré said, completing the
interviewer's sentence.
"And they are all in agreement," the
journalist continued, stating another
common theme of the French version of the
war. "This is a war for oil."
It is virtually impossible even in
intelligent circles in France today to
make an argument that the war in Iraq is
motivated by anything other than oil.
After all, no modern French government has
ever called its people to war with the
stated mission of liberating the people of
another nation from tyranny, so it's
absurd to believe the United States could
act on such motivation. "Before Baghdad
has even fallen," wrote the Washington
correspondent of the center-right daily Le
Figaro on April 7, "the Americans are
preparing the energy future of the
country. ... After having invented the
concept of 'preventive war,' the Americans
have now inaugurated the concept of
'lucrative peace.'"
Writing for the official French news
agency Agence France-Presse (AFP),
commentator Karim Sahib stated the case
directly: "For most of those who oppose
the war against Iraq, the control of Iraqi
oil is the main reason the Bush
administration pushed toward
confrontation. The fact that the American
president and his vice president, Dick
Cheney, both emerged from the Texas oil
industry and were brought to the summit of
the political chessboard by the oil
lobbies has fueled the fires of 'No blood
for oil' protesters. ... Removing Saddam
from power and installing a government
more favorable to the Americans will
permit the United States more easily to
put their hands on Iraq's [oil]
reserves, the second largest in the
world."
A parallel theme "explains" the U.S.
war fever by depicting America as a
neo-fascist state that has silenced voices
of protests using McCarthy-era tactics.
Under the USA PATRIOT Act, novelist le
Carré said, "Any mailman who sees a
book on Islam at your house can denounce
you as someone potentially dangerous. It's
hallucinatory! Nothing has changed since
1952. We're in full security hysteria in
the United States."
In a news panel the next evening - just
hours before the initial air strikes
against the al-Daura farm where Saddam and
his sons were believed to be spending the
night - a France Inter commentator spoke
of America's "disgraceful nationalism" in
the wake of 9/11. Europe had learned the
dangers of nationalism from the Nazi era,
he said. America had not.
In a pop-culture show later that
evening geared to younger listeners, a
disc jockey played a smooth cut-and-paste
of speeches by President Bush - in his own
voice - assembled to convey precisely the
opposite of their original meaning. To a
driving rock beat of "Allahu akbar"
[God is greater], the president
announced that the United States "is about
to launch attacks against Great Britain
and 40 other countries. ... We are
attacking freedom. ... The name of today's
operation is called Enduring Fear. ... The
people of Iraq will suffer. ... We are
attacking freedom." There was not a shred
of humor in the presentation. It was a
crude attempt at arousing anti-American
hate and even violence by appealing to the
huge Muslim population in France to
identify Americans as the enemies of God.
Yasser Arafat uses similar tactics in the
state-run mosques in his Palestinian
Authority to incite hatred of Jews.
A half-hour interview with former
French ambassador to Tunisia Eric Rouleau,
a hard-left commentator who never was
tender on America in the best of times,
sounded another theme the French
government has been eager to convey: The
U.S. "attack" on Iraq was going to provoke
waves of anti-West terrorism as young
people revolted against the U.S.
"occupation" of Arab land. Rouleau said he
had just returned from Saudi Arabia, where
he had met Crown Prince Abdullah and other
leaders. They told him the problems they
had faced with al-Qaeda terrorists were
the result of the "U.S. occupation of
Saudi Arabia since 1991." The mood
throughout the Arab world was gloomy,
brooding, pessimistic, Rouleau said. The
biggest fear among the Arabs, according to
Rouleau, was that Israel would use the
opportunity of the war to carry out
"ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians.
"Do you understand what you're saying?"
the journalist asked, reminding Rouleau
that the charge of ethnic cleansing was
emotionally charged and usually connoted
mass murder. "I'm just telling you what
the Palestinians fear," Rouleau replied
blandly. "There will be massacres, of
course."
The sense of national hallucination
that has gripped France is being driven by
the nation's leaders. President Chirac
showed during last year's runoff election
against LePen that he has the demagogue's
talent for demonizing an enemy. In
demagoguing the war in Iraq, Chirac
realized he could rally France's diverse
political parties behind him by denouncing
U.S. "unilateralism" in favor of
"international law" and "legitimacy,"
areas where France feels it can play as
America's equal. With the media and
government piled on, America has few
defenders in France today.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a deeply
anti-American former defense minister,
said the conflict was a U.S.-led "war of
recolonialization that will inevitably
lead to a war of national liberation."
Writing in Le Monde on April 7, he said
the "real question now is the withdrawal
of U.S. troops ... because for the United
States, military victory has already lost
any rational political sense." The war, he
claimed, "has been dreamed up by the
Pentagon strategists as a war of world
domination through the occupation of Iraq
and the control of the Middle East. ... We
need to help the United States to
profoundly revise their relations with
'the rest of the world.'" A Socialist, he
had only praise for Chirac and his
anti-U.S. policies.
An opinion poll published on April 1 in
the daily Le Monde showed that Frenchmen
by a slim majority (53 percent)
nevertheless hoped for a coalition victory
in Iraq. (The question did not use the
world "coalition," but rather a victory of
"American-British forces.") Of much
greater concern was the second half of the
poll. Fully 25 percent of Frenchmen polled
said they hoped Saddam would win the war.
Sensing that the demagoguery had gone
too far, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin told an audience in
Clermont-Ferrand on March 31 that they
needed to return to reason. "We think this
war is not a good alternative," he said,
reminding listeners of the reasons his
government refused to endorse the
coalition effort. "But this is not a
reason to mistake the enemy. The Americans
are not the enemies. Our camp is the camp
of democracy." An unnamed "source" close
to Chirac issued a similar statement from
the Elysee Palace. "The president has
always denounced the dictatorial regime in
Baghdad and has reaffirmed that we are
allies of the United States," the
spokesman said. To thus describe the
positions of a president who for more than
a quarter-century has publicly referred to
Saddam as a "personal friend" is yet
another example of the Alice-in-Wonderland
mood that has gripped France.
For the French prime minister to feel
that he needed to remind the media and the
public that America is not the enemy shows
the extent of the damage Chirac has done
to U.S.-French relations. Since his
statement, the French desperately have
been trying to mend fences, insisting that
the United Nations assume the primary role
for postwar reconstruction in Iraq. "No
one should think Iraq will be an El Dorado
to be split up," the French foreign
minister told the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London. The
French media have reported extensively on
efforts by Congress and the administration
to "punish" France for its opposition to
the war by banning French companies from
postwar reconstruction projects. "The
civilian leadership of the Pentagon, which
gives the Bush administration its radical
tone, are brutally clear: Chirac must pay
for his insolence," Le Figaro reported
from Washington. The real U.S. goal in the
postwar era is "to dilute the European
Union," the paper stated, quoting a French
researcher with the Brookings Institution.
"More than ever, the U.S. rejects Jacques
Chirac's project to convert Europe into a
counterweight to the power of the United
States."
But, while the French are scrambling to
gain a commercial foothold in postwar Iraq
by insisting on a renewed U.N. role in
distributing aid and reconstruction
contracts, their skewed war reporting
continues.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer
for Insight magazine. email the author
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