I have the strangest feeling that German troops may be marshalling on the French border:
PARIS--The French are trying to make up--well, some of them. A year after Paris threatened to use its veto in the Security Council to block United Nations' approval of military action against Iraq, French business people, artists, and media personalities are planning what they're calling "Liberty Week" to celebrate the "friendship" between France and the United States. The events are scheduled to coincide with the 60th-anniversary celebration this spring of the D-Day Normandy Beach landings, which President Bush is expected to attend. Many Americans, furious at France's opposition to the war, pointed out that the French seemed to have forgotten who liberated them from Nazi Germany. Seems the criticism touched a chord. "I am struck by the deterioration of France's image in the United States," says Pierre Lellouche, the idea's architect, who has a Ph.D. in international relations from Harvard University. "We told ourselves that it was necessary to do something about it."
Seriously though, it is a shame how far the old alliances have crumbled, largely in the name of France's soul-chewing ego, immoral economic interests and the politically expedient appeasement of a pacifist electorate. Don't drink the "cowboy unilateralist" Kool-Aide, kids: no amount of "multilateralism" by a US President could ever have hoped to compete with billions of dollars in ill-gotten oil deals or de Villepin's compulsive desire to strut for the cameras and put the exclamation point on France's exponentially enlarging irrelevance.
To continue the high-minded discourse that may repair the trans-Atlantic alliance, I offer a note of peace and understanding to Dean's French readers: Liberty Week is a nice first step, and I sincerely hope that we can overcome this grave rift between our two countries. You must understand, Americans don't want to hate you, we'd much rather go back to the amused disdain/annoyance we've largely felt over the past 60 years, ever since we let de Gaulle play pretend and roll into Paris as your "liberator."
Now get rid of the "ver," bitchez!
You are spot on noting that this nonsense started with de Gaulle.
It began a lot earlier, Dave, in 1919 to be exact.
Woodrow Wilson, then US president, had convinced the German government to agree to an armistice in November 1918 on the strength of his "14 points", which, among other things called for simply ending the war and returning to the pre-1914 European international borders. An exception was made to for return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, because most of the population was French in these provinces which had been ruled by Germany since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
But the French government was not satisfied with that, and wanted to occupy and annex all German lands west of the Rhine river, lands which had been purely German since the age of the emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century. The French president of that era, Georges Clemenceau, began making unreasonable and insistent demands on Wilson. Beyond that, the British, French, Japanese, and Australians all used the armistice as an excuse to annex (as League of Nations 'mandates') the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific ocean. The war to end all wars, indeed.
All this after a fresh, large US army, the American Expeditionary Force or AEF, under the command of the immortal General John Pershing, saved the collective asses of the allies who were on the verge of defeat in the late spring of 1918. My own late father, Max Harris, was in France with the AEF in 1918, as a young soldier of 24-25 years of age.
"Over there, over there
Send the word, send the word, over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming ev'rywhere
So prepare say a pray'r
Send the word, send the word to beware
We'll be over, we're coming over,
And we won't come back till it's over over there!"
(from the works of George M Cohan)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI