An authoritative insight as to why the French can't grasp US resolve about Iraq--from Europundit: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 THE FRENCH BLIND SPOT by Nelson Ascher Paris, France There's something I find striking and even more so because I have known about it for some time but hadn’t realized it until now. There are 3 main newspapers in France.... The whole discussion is obviously Franco-centric and they are much less filled with doubts than their American counterparts. Even when they criticize their own government, they make a point of using harsher terms with Bush and the neocon hawks: For instance, Chirac may be misguided, but Bush is surely irrational…..[E]ven as they judge negatively some of Chirac's attitudes and give him advice, they do believe that Bush and his administration are somewhat mad, beyond reason, and what's worse, motivated solely by some kind of deep religious feeling the French are unable to understand. These French journalists do not follow the American debate and they really think it is a big thing that there are antiwar protests in the US. They're also amazed with the fact that the NYT opposes the president: some of them are in no doubt that the NYT has only quite recently, in the last few days indeed, courageously broken some never previously challenged taboo, and it did this because presidential madness has reached a point where not even such a loyalist paper could remain silent anymore. Sunday's NYT antiwar editorial has been translated and published both in Le Figaro (conservative) and the Libération (leftist) as if it were a very big deal, a kind of revolution in the American press….Their ignorance about America is enormous. And maybe this explains, in part at least, what is really missing from their picture, what it is that they almost never mention and are unable to relate to the present crisis: 911. Those attacks are almost totally absent from their discussions and debates…. They consider it opportunistic and almost in bad taste to make any mention to the subject. They don’t take quite seriously anything the Americans say about it…. Thus I’m convinced that even well-meaning non-anti-American rational Frenchmen simply don’t get it. It’s not only that they didn’t understand 911, ***they have not even begun to come to terms with the ways in which it has changed the American worldview.*** http://www.europundits.blogspot.com/ [***emphasis added***]
