So is the magic over?
- Thread starter grymster2007
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TacticalDefense1911
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cool hand luke, now thats funny!
The magic isn't over but the drunkenness sure the hell is. Now America needs to sober up and get clear about ourselves and the world. I suspect we will have no choice.
As for the French and the Euros and other members of the future Eurabian Caliphate, I wouldn't be too smug and complacent.
As for the French and the Euros and other members of the future Eurabian Caliphate, I wouldn't be too smug and complacent.
I think what the interview is getting at is that "the magic" is America's ability to broker diplomatic resolutions. While the easy and childish response is to call him names, anybody here would be hard-pressed to rebut the charge. Heck yes the "magic" is gone. Maybe that's not a bad thing overall...
Now in the larger context of this thread... it depends on your personal definition of "the magic".
My idea of the magic of America is the idea that it was an entire nation devoted to freedom.
That magic is gone too.
Now in the larger context of this thread... it depends on your personal definition of "the magic".
My idea of the magic of America is the idea that it was an entire nation devoted to freedom.
That magic is gone too.
cool hand luke 22:36
New member
The French know everything, you should ask them.
cool hand luke 22:36
New member
"Hans..do you smell cheese?"
The French Were Right
By Paul Starobin, National Journal
Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11 world (and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do): The French were right. Let's say it again: The French -- yes, those "cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United States so pungently called them -- were right.
Jacques Chirac and his camp, shaped by the Algerian war and their own recent lessons in fighting terrorism, correctly predicted the consequences of invading Iraq.
"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President Jacques Rene Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16 interview on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq. "Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and may be very dangerous," Chirac advised. And this was not some last-minute heads-up, but the culmination of a full-brief argument that the French advanced against the perils of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over months at the United Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris, Prague, and Washington. There were, of course, other war critics in Europe and elsewhere, but nobody presented the arguments more insistently or comprehensively than did the French, God bless 'em.
Related Resources
On NationalJournal.com
Polling On Iraq
·
Insider Interview: John Zogby On Iraqi Public Opinion
·
Insider Interview: Bruce Gregory On America's Image Abroad
·
National Journal Cover Story: Ramadan Offensive
(Oct. 31, 2003)
·
National Journal Social Studies Column: Bush Is No Cowboy. But If He Were, It Wouldn't Matter
(Oct. 31, 2003)
·
U.S. Military Deaths In "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
Additional Information
On The Web
Chirac's CNN Interview
(March 16, 2003)
·
Rumsfeld's Oct. 16 Leaked Memo On Iraqi Progress
·
Address To U.S. Institute Of Peace By French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte
(Feb. 7, 2003)
·
American Enterprise Institute's Study On Public Opinion Of America And The War On Terrorism
·
Zogby Poll On Iraqi Public Opinion
·
Brookings Institution's Article: "The French's Experience of Counter-terrorism"
·
Ambassador Djerejian's Report On America's Image In The Arab World
·
History Of French-American Relations
But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed to the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad idea, but that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to Western interests and to the larger war on terror. And now the administration is finding itself in an increasingly unhappy situation in Iraq, with its 130,000-strong contingent there the target of a sophisticated and lethal guerrilla campaign waged by foreign Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to Congress's backing of the president's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the White House strains to explain the failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction, whose supposed presence in the country, after all, was a prime rationale for the war. Even avid war proponents concede that the United States is in for "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a recently leaked memo. America, in short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own making. Leave it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of predicament. The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1944 play, on the suffering that human beings tend to visit on themselves, No Exit.
In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration got into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were so mistaken. But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the Administration Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It Right." To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck type of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by partisan, factional enmity. But to ask why the French were right is to put the matter in a more positive, constructive vein. And the question has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter of assigning historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary rethinking of the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in a fitful, truculent mood, has in any event already begun, with its recent plea for help from the United Nations and other countries, France included, and its stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in charge of security.
Hold on. Were the French really right? After all, Iraq is not a finished matter. What looks like a mess today may yet get sorted out. Most supporters of the war continue to believe it was justified, despite the problems it has caused. Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that the French, and in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain analytical purchase on the situation that the Bush administration lacked.
The French made three basic claims -- all countered, in varying degrees of intensity, by the administration. The first was that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent, and that's borne out by all available evidence, not least the latest report by Bush-appointed arms inspector David Kay, in which he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had been found. The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process -- with the Iraqi population very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by various fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a majority of Iraqis would like the United States to leave. And third, the French correctly predicted that the Muslim world would perceive a U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United Nations as illegitimate -- and thus would incite even greater anger toward America.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2003/1107nj1.htm
By Paul Starobin, National Journal
Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11 world (and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do): The French were right. Let's say it again: The French -- yes, those "cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United States so pungently called them -- were right.
Jacques Chirac and his camp, shaped by the Algerian war and their own recent lessons in fighting terrorism, correctly predicted the consequences of invading Iraq.
"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President Jacques Rene Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16 interview on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq. "Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and may be very dangerous," Chirac advised. And this was not some last-minute heads-up, but the culmination of a full-brief argument that the French advanced against the perils of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over months at the United Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris, Prague, and Washington. There were, of course, other war critics in Europe and elsewhere, but nobody presented the arguments more insistently or comprehensively than did the French, God bless 'em.
Related Resources
On NationalJournal.com
Polling On Iraq
·
Insider Interview: John Zogby On Iraqi Public Opinion
·
Insider Interview: Bruce Gregory On America's Image Abroad
·
National Journal Cover Story: Ramadan Offensive
(Oct. 31, 2003)
·
National Journal Social Studies Column: Bush Is No Cowboy. But If He Were, It Wouldn't Matter
(Oct. 31, 2003)
·
U.S. Military Deaths In "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
Additional Information
On The Web
Chirac's CNN Interview
(March 16, 2003)
·
Rumsfeld's Oct. 16 Leaked Memo On Iraqi Progress
·
Address To U.S. Institute Of Peace By French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte
(Feb. 7, 2003)
·
American Enterprise Institute's Study On Public Opinion Of America And The War On Terrorism
·
Zogby Poll On Iraqi Public Opinion
·
Brookings Institution's Article: "The French's Experience of Counter-terrorism"
·
Ambassador Djerejian's Report On America's Image In The Arab World
·
History Of French-American Relations
But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed to the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad idea, but that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to Western interests and to the larger war on terror. And now the administration is finding itself in an increasingly unhappy situation in Iraq, with its 130,000-strong contingent there the target of a sophisticated and lethal guerrilla campaign waged by foreign Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to Congress's backing of the president's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the White House strains to explain the failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction, whose supposed presence in the country, after all, was a prime rationale for the war. Even avid war proponents concede that the United States is in for "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a recently leaked memo. America, in short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own making. Leave it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of predicament. The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1944 play, on the suffering that human beings tend to visit on themselves, No Exit.
In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration got into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were so mistaken. But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the Administration Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It Right." To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck type of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by partisan, factional enmity. But to ask why the French were right is to put the matter in a more positive, constructive vein. And the question has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter of assigning historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary rethinking of the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in a fitful, truculent mood, has in any event already begun, with its recent plea for help from the United Nations and other countries, France included, and its stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in charge of security.
Hold on. Were the French really right? After all, Iraq is not a finished matter. What looks like a mess today may yet get sorted out. Most supporters of the war continue to believe it was justified, despite the problems it has caused. Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that the French, and in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain analytical purchase on the situation that the Bush administration lacked.
The French made three basic claims -- all countered, in varying degrees of intensity, by the administration. The first was that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent, and that's borne out by all available evidence, not least the latest report by Bush-appointed arms inspector David Kay, in which he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had been found. The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process -- with the Iraqi population very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by various fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a majority of Iraqis would like the United States to leave. And third, the French correctly predicted that the Muslim world would perceive a U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United Nations as illegitimate -- and thus would incite even greater anger toward America.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2003/1107nj1.htm
Help From France Key In Covert Operations
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 3, 2005; Page A01
PARIS -- When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.
Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361.html
Paris's 'Alliance Base' Targets Terrorists
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 3, 2005; Page A01
PARIS -- When Christian Ganczarski, a German convert to Islam, boarded an Air France flight from Riyadh on June 3, 2003, he knew only that the Saudi government had put him under house arrest for an expired pilgrim visa and had given his family one-way tickets back to Germany, with a change of planes in Paris.
He had no idea that he was being secretly escorted by an undercover officer sitting behind him, or that a senior CIA officer was waiting at the end of the jetway as French authorities gently separated him from his family and swept Ganczarski into French custody, where he remains today on suspicion of associating with terrorists.
Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361.html
French soldiers in Afghanistan
http://forums.accuratereloading.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/7811043/m/408107308
http://forums.accuratereloading.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/7811043/m/408107308
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