By Jerry
Ghinelli
01/22/07 "ICH"
-- - Nearly halfway
through its fifth year, the French mission to
bring democracy to the US, free the American
people from the tyranny of George W. Bush and
rid the world of America’s stockpile of weapons
of mass destruction has entered yet another
phase, as blame, finger pointing and the “D”
word (defeat) have now crept into the dialogue.
You’ll recall that
France, the self-described greatest nation on
earth, invaded the US back in March of 2003, in
what then Prime Minister Jacques Chirac
euphemistically coined Occupation American
Freedom (OAF).
But OAF, as some
skeptics have argued, was a bit clumsy; it
stumbled badly and, even worse, is now seen by
many as a fairy tale.
Chirac warned the
world back then that the illegitimate regime of
the unelected tyrant, George W. Bush, who stole
the 2000 election and invaded his neighbors,
possessed weapons of mass destruction and was an
imminent and mortal threat to the powerful
French republic.
Now mired in
America, as they were just a few decades ago in
Vietnam, the French public, politicians and the
media are growing increasingly tired of a war
that has gone on longer than it took for the
glorious French resistance forces to expel Nazis
from France during the 1940s.
With Chirac now
retired to his villa on the French Riviera,
newly elected Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is
the latest architect of yet another grand
strategy, which he proudly describes as “Le
Surge.”
Le Surge is
expected to bring peace and stability to the
region by escalating the violence.
Sarkozy insists Le
Surge is necessary to win the war against the
extremists who want to take away the freedoms
the French people enjoy. “An evil and wicked
lot, ‘they’ will stop at nothing to follow us
home, even if it means ‘swimming’ across the
Atlantic to attack us in our homes, in our
schools and in our places of worship,”
hypothesized Sarkozy.
“We must fight them
on the streets of New Orleans, or we’ll be
fighting them on the streets of Orléans,” he
warned. “Bring
’em on,” he declared.
“Bring ’em on”
indeed.
Since 2003, nearly
4,000 French soldiers and now 1,000 French
foreign legion contractors have been killed,
another 30,000 wounded, and one half-trillion
euros spent as France has paid a terrible price
in both blood and treasure to protect its people
from those evildoers who prefer slavery to
freedom.
“I grieve at the
loss of every drop of French blood,” said the
bereaved Nicolas Sarkozy, “but such is the price
we must pay for liberty.” When questioned about
the “give or take” 1,000,000 American deaths
caused by the French invasion, he reminded
everyone that the French “don’t do body counts.”
“One French death
is a tragedy,” said Sarkozy, “a million American
deaths is a statistic.”
Back on the streets
of Paris, the mood has turned sour. With more
and more of the French public sensing another
military defeat, like they experienced in
Vietnam, support for the war has plummeted.
Parisians saddled
with massive personal debt, a declining euro,
falling home prices, foreclosures, a lousy
health care system, a crumbling infrastructure
and the legacy of another Vietnam syndrome
looming on the horizon are becoming more and
more disgruntled with every passing day.
But a recent
rebound in the CAC 40 stock market index, a
half-point reduction in interest rates and a
slight drop in the price of petrol prices helped
lift their spirits and their anxiety, at least
for the time being.
Nonetheless,
questions are now being asked that should have
been asked back in ’02.
Skeptics now
contend that perhaps the real reason for the
French invasion was not to bring democracy, food
and medicine to the beleaguered Americans, or
that they gave a hoot about the tyrant Bush;
skeptics contend that the French hoped to thwart
superpowers such as China and Russia by
controlling the vast natural resources of the
US. The French hoped to establish the euro as
the world’s reserve currency, extend hegemony
over the North American continent and provide
security for the only real democracy on the
North American continent—French Quebec. “A
three-billion-euro annual defense aid package is
not nearly enough to ensure the safety and
security of Quebec,” noted Sarkozy.
Now,
politicians—especially in the opposition
party—who initially supported France’s mission
to free the American people from the clutches of
the tyrant Bush and his arsenal of banned
weapons, in what appears to be yet another
defeat are complaining that they were deceived
and misled. “If we only knew then what we know
now, we would have been against this war before
we were for it,” they lamented.
“Victory has many
fathers, and defeat is an orphan,” said one
pundit in a rare moment of candor.
Sarkozy, however,
was defiant in his resolve to achieve victory.
“We will not
surrender to the forces of evil,” he said
emphatically. “They are a vicious and sinister
enemy who will stop at nothing to kill our
children. They hate us because we’re good. They
hate the special freedoms the French people
enjoy. They want to force their brand of
fundamentalist Christianity on us and the
world. And they will be brought to justice, or
they will have justice brought to them. So help
me God,” declared a defiant Sarkozy.
Those who predicted
the invasion would be a "soufflé
promenade"
(cakewalk) are now predicting that if the French
were to pull their troops out, America would
disintegrate into chaos.
The pundits grimly
predict that without the French acting as a
referee for these savage, backward Americans,
violence will spread throughout the continent,
spiraling out of control and destabilizing North
America as a whole. The southern states would
likely secede, as they did in 1860. Mexico would
reclaim the southwest; Canada the northeast.
Protestants and Catholics would kill each other,
and Christians would likely take revenge against
the Jews for, as they allege, crucifying Christ
2,000 years ago.
“These people
[Americans] have been fighting for 300 years,”
claimed Sarkozy. “They slaughtered the Indians,
enslaved blacks, deprived women of the right to
vote, discriminated against Jews, Irish and
Italians, and interned the Japanese. They
delight in ethnic jokes, particularly Polish
ones. They tie gay men to fence posts, drag
African Americans from the back of pick-up
trucks, bomb each other with trucks filled with
chemicals and fertilizer, and delight in the
execution of minorities, women, the mentally
retarded and adolescents. They murder each other
by the tens of thousands each year. They have
more hand guns than televisions.
They shoot up schools from kindergarten to
university and go ‘postal’ in the workplace
every other week.
When we
leave, there will be chaos
in America,” Sarkozy predicted.
“Women are
oppressed in North America,” he continued. “They
must wear bikini burqas while sunbathing, or
else be arrested by vice squads. We need to
bring the French cultural values and traditions
to these backward American people,” said the
compassionate conservative Sarkozy. “Vive la
France,” he proudly proclaimed.
But the Americans
see this as a struggle for their independence
from foreign occupation.
As in 1776, the
insurgents see themselves as patriots freeing
the land from foreign invaders. True, the
differences among ethnic and religious groups
have been violent over the past 230 years, but
for the most part, the Americans had cobbled
together a magnificent
melting pot of religious and ethnic
groups and built what some might call “a great
society.” Americans landed a man on the moon
and, along with their former ally, France,
defeated the tyranny of Adolf Hitler, Tojo and
Mussolini.
But history begins
only at the time and date of our choosing,
proclaimed Sarkozy.
Now that once-great
society, the late great United States, lies
tattered and broken at the hands of the French
invaders. True, many Americans hated the tyrant
Bush and his regime of evildoers, but the chaos,
death, destruction and depravation caused by the
French liberation is so much worse.
The insurgents,
once again, likened the struggle to
defeating the British. Like the British before
them, the French will eventfully leave, said one
American insurgent. “They will either march out
or be carried out. Give me liberty or give me
death. God bless America and President Bush.”
Former President
George W. Bush, you’ll recall, was captured by
French liberation forces back in December 2003
in a spider hole near his ranch in Crawford,
Texas.
Bush, an aviator
and war hero, is best remembered for protecting
the
Texas border from
the invading
Viet Cong
guerillas, who also
followed the Americans home by paddling
across the Pacific in their Chinese-made
sampans, after the “dominos fell” in Southeast
Asia, back in the
early seventies.
This time, though,
Bush engaged the enemy in mortal hand-to-hand
combat, resisting the superior forces while
shouting, “Remember the Alamo,” at the terrified
French soldiers.
But it was more
like Custer’s Last Stand for Bush.
After a show trial
conducted by the Democrats, under French
occupation, Bush was hanged back in December
2006 for crimes against his own people. As
governor of Texas, Bush executed 152 of his
fellow Texans, using lethal chemical injections,
and also wire-tapped, exiled and tortured his
own people without due process of law.
The French,
however, have brought some useful reforms to
North America since the 2003 invasion, most
notably, the right for Americans to vote in free
and fair elections.
Under French
supervision, Americans from coast to coast
recently went to the polls and, for the first
time in memory, there were no hanging chads,
butterfly ballots or rigged Diebold machines.
Americans simply
voted by dipping their fingers into purple ink
and casting their lot for the candidate of their
choice. It was back to basics, one man one vote,
and the citizenry saluted the French by holding
up a purple “middle finger” in a
universal expression of gratitude for their
newfound liberation.
But down in Dixie,
the hotbed of the insurgency and the cradle of
violence, the mood was not so grateful.
Americans from the
recently liberated and pacified province of
Texas dismissed the elections as farcical and
the candidates as French puppets. French forces,
whose mission is to pacify the Texas insurgents,
know only a single English word—“Redneck”—and
routinely knock
on (down)
doors at around 2:00 a.m., in an effort to win over
their hearts and minds.
When interrogated
as to why the ungrateful American insurgents
attack the French with crude, lethal, homemade
weapons, the answer from the insurgents was
simple: “You give us the F-16s,” they
said, “we’ll give you the IEDs [impoverished
explosive device]. You give us the tanks, we’ll
give you the car bombs. You leave our land,
we’ll leave you alone.”
