YOU THOUGHT COPMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM WAS AN OXYMORON?:

French Lies About Iraq (Nidra Poller, February 19, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

AH:  My book is based on articles published in 5 major French newspapers--Le Monde, La Croix, Le Figaro, Libération, Ouest-France—during the three week period from the beginning of the war on March 20th to the fall of Baghdad on April 9th.  I studied the way these papers covered the war and I concluded that they misinformed their readers.  As a result, readers couldn’t understand how the Iraqi regime fell in three weeks.  I think this misinformation can be explained by an extraordinary atmosphere of nationalism in France at that time, following on the diplomatic crisis in which France and Germany stood against the US and Great Britain.  French people were unanimous on three points: they demonized the Bush and Blair administrations, approved the diplomatic line of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, and communed with the pacifist movement.  And journalists reported the war they would like to see rather than the war that was. 

Two or three days after the operation began a few Americans were captured, wounded, or killed in action, and five days into the campaign the press was already talking about a quagmire, then about Vietnam.  They said the Pentagon’s plan was wrong, there weren’t enough soldiers, the military equipment was too sophisticated for this kind of campaign and the Americans were stuck 80 km from Baghdad.  Some said it would take weeks, months, some said they wouldn’t start moving toward Baghdad before the summer.  Of course what happened is that the Americans were at the gates of Baghdad by the 2nd or 3rd of April.  The French press didn’t explain why this happened; they began to announce that the battle of Baghdad would be a new Stalingrad.  And of course that didn’t happen either.  After a few little raids in the city Saddam Hussein’s regime fell.  Journalists didn’t explain why they had made those prophecies and announcements, and why it happened another way.  They said the worst is ahead.

I think the reason why the press didn’t report the war the way it was is due to this extraordinary atmosphere--there was no plot, no conspiracy, no collective or individual will to misinform readers.  Journalists didn’t keep a decent professional distance from what was happening.  They were more excited by bad news about the offensive than good news.  I think they themselves were totally surprised by the outcome, as were the readers.  I see three reasons for this.  One is the extraordinary anti-Americanism at that time.  I think this has a lot to do with the personality of G. W. Bush and his administration.  G. W. Bush is the kind of American the French love to hate.  Then there is some kind of nostalgia for a time when France was an important player on the international scene.  Jacques Chirac and Dominique De Villepin were able to inflame the French nostalgia for that time.  And also there is Arabophilia…in a very bad sense of the term.  Arabophilia is not a problem in itself but here it is in a bad sense. 

It’s nothing new, it’s not just in connection with Iraq; t has to do with the history of France in Algeria.  There is more compassion…we see this in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sometimes there is more compassion for the Palestinian victims than for the Israelis.  There was a lot of compassion for the Iraqi people.  This was the second war, there had been a very long embargo.  I think the French, like any Western power, feel a little bit guilty that this embargo lasted so long, and that they didn’t go all the way to Baghdad 12 years ago, in the first war, and solve the problem.  All of these factors led to compassion for the Iraqi side.

Ah, French compassion, which requires people to live under a dictatorship?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2004 9:16 AM