"Be Careful !" Chirac to USA [Eve of Iraq War]

The French Were Right, Paul Starobin, National Journal, Friday Nov. 7 2003

"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President Jacques René 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. 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.
...

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.
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France was the only country, other than the United States, to conduct air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with their Mirage jets and Super Etendard fighters hitting more than 30 targets during Operation Anaconda in March 2002. The French enthusiastically backed the Afghanistan war, breaking with Washington only on the Iraq question.

No more persuasive is the widely voiced (in the U.S.) argument that the French were defending wide-reaching and profitable commercial relationships with Saddam's regime. The truth is that France enjoyed minor economic ties with Saddam. Under the United Nations' now-defunct Oil for Food program with Saddam's Iraq, the French were only the 13th-largest participant. The U.S. under that program bought more than 50 percent of Iraq's total oil exports, the French 8 percent.
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One big reason the French were right is that they were thinking along the lines that Americans are generally apt to think - that is, in a cautious, pragmatic way, informed by their own particular trial-and-error experience, in this case as an occupier forced out of Algeria and as a front-line battler, long before 9/11, against global Islamic terrorist groups.
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There is only one Western country with an intimate, bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is France, which granted independence to Algeria in 1963 after failing to subdue an eight-year-long rebellion by cold-blooded assassins who didn't blanch at bombing Algiers nightclubs frequented by French teenagers.
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The Islamic world, as the most immediately problematic for the French, received France's priority attention. In the United States, it was only with 9/11 that beginning a dialogue with the Muslim community came to seem urgent, but the French, because of Algeria, had embarked on this road decades before. "The U.S. is still a bit virginal in its relationship with the Islamic part of the world," notes Simon Serfaty, who is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The French know this part of the world better."
The Algerian uprising certainly made a powerful impression on a young man destined for France's highest political office: Jacques Chirac. Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23, to serve as an officer in the French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in an isolated mountainous region of Algeria. The mission was to keep order. But order proved impossible to keep, with the local population protective of the fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the Front de Liberation National (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in engagements with the guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were killed. In a speech to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called his time there the most important formative experience of his life.
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So the French are not virgins when it comes to occupations. Nor are they virgins when it comes to countering international terrorism.
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Paris possessed counter-terrorism capabilities, oriented toward preventing attacks, second to none in the Western world in effectiveness. And French Mirages were dropping bombs on Afghanistan.
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"We Are All Americans" - "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" - the front page of Le Monde declared on September 13, 2001. And with Levitte at the helm of the U.N. Security Council, that body, for the first time in its history, declared that an act of terrorism was equivalent to an act of war.
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French authorities suspected links between Al Qaeda and Chechen rebels, but not between Al Qaeda and Baghdad, French officials stated publicly at that time.
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Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• US
• Iraq
• War
• Bush
• Blair
• Chirac
• Villepin
• Irak
• Terrorism
• Saddam
• Hussein

[MartialartsDog]

US should listen to France when it comes to counter insurgency and anti terrorism-France has been doing those things decades before the US did!

[mbarana100]

WTF sanctions against france for not going into Iraq and bombing the place to hell man americans are stupid I am was not against the removal of saddam hussein but the US and UK went about it like a bunch of third world morons

[Mupkinsful]

That's quite a lovely love declaration there. Sorry the Americans didn't see it at that time.

[mbarana100]

does the americans remember who helped them with independance france and even Hati i bet nobady know one knew tht but anyway ppl help ppl don't use it as a weapon later we know the US helped with the liberation in Europe but don't use it as a manipulation tool later on don't use the blood of human beings as a weapon

[YoungStudCertified]

The french were smart enough not to follow the U.S.A into a foolish war that was based on a lie. Look at what happened. The french made a good move there.

[MegaBalamb]

merci jacques

[cocardeux]

@etetepete Because TV wants to brainwash (you know it). Think about all the lonely persons who sit in front of their TV after work, the TV is for them a presence, something reassuring, so TV programs mustn't be too clever... Everything is based on feelings, people vote for the most flattering and charismatic person, not for the most intelligent. And the stupid thing is that the president himself has NO power... So all of this is a comedy for money.

[etetepete]

Why do I allways get the feeling that TV journalism in the USA is very unprofessional?

This interview was extremely infantile considering it was only days before it's host nation declared War on another nation.

I think more mature and precise questions would have been more appropriate.

Why was the level of the interviewer so low?

[Anfubvinch]

@MartialartsDog True!

[Mayfesses]

Does "PM" mean Prime Minister?

He's been a President too.

[mouradprotest]

The invasion of Iraq was not a victory. The American government should compensate Iraqi citizens for going into Iraq due to bogus CIA reports. Now all that remains there are gravestones, a pulverized infrastructure and great political instability that has set the Iraqi people back generations. What is the US doing to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq? Talk is cheap, Obama, show the Iraqis the money .