Why the French Resist War

By: Gene Lyons

I met my favorite Frenchman on a tennis court in Texas. Mutual friends thought we would be well-matched opponents. Alain had arrived in the United States only two days earlier. Always the aggressor, he charged the net early in our first match, and I lifted a lob over his head. Rather than retreating to play it on the bounce, Alain leaped into the air, took a mighty swing and fanned.

"Ouf", he grunted. "I sink I am Bob McAdoo."

McAdoo was a 7-foot NBA player. What manner of Frenchman, much less a literature professor, I wondered, knew that? It was Alain's way of mocking himself. An avid sportsman, he'd spent his first afternoon in America watching basketball on TV. Fit and muscular, he'd competed for France in volleyball. No Gauloise-puffing café intellectual, he was an ardent outdoorsman, a hunter of birds and wild boars, and a rock climber.

After we knew each other better, Alain confided that he'd been initially taken aback by my asking if he was a Parisian. He feared I'd found him haughty and arrogant. Au contraire, mon ami. His home was Montpellier, a city roughly the size of Little Rock on the Mediterranean coast near Spain. He used to enjoy siding with my wife, whose origins are in French Louisiana, in petty disagreements. "We Latins", Alain would announce mischievously, had arrived at a mutual position about who should drive or where to eat dinner. The Latins, it appeared, always chose the more passionate option, or the one with most garlic.

I've been in touch with my old friend by e-mail as the Op-Ed warriors and the country club tough guys of the Bush administration ridicule France in terms appropriate to a Monty Python skit. "I have to denounce the vacillation of the [French] Government in the strongest terms", I wrote. "They fiddle while Ishmaelia burns. A spark is set to the cornerstone of civilization which will shake its roots like a chilling breath."

It's a passage from Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel Scoop I knew Alain would recognize. (If it doesn't make you smile, you've been reading too many editorials.) Quite conservative - Socialists, he thinks, are always incompetent and usually corrupt - his first response, passionately as always, was to assure me that France has not forgotten WWI or WWII, nor the close friendship between our countries. The French have no illusions about Saddam Hussein and would like to be rid of him. But they see no immediate threat. If he can be de-fanged and contained, that would be preferable to risking WWIII.

Most French observers see terrible danger in either of two post-Saddam scenarios: either the U.S. leaves Iraq in chaos and ruins, then bugs out leaving the Europeans holding the bag, as we've basically done in Afghanistan; or we occupy it indefinitely, turning the region into a huge West Bank and insuring an exponential growth of Islamic extremism and al Qaeda terrorism.

What Alain implied but was too polite to say was that if the swaggering puppy Bush was in too big a hurry to seek U.N. approval, he shouldn't have asked. Our allies are democracies, after all, and upwards of 80% of the public opposes invading Iraq. (No doubt reacting to U.S. bullying, an astonishing 87% of the French do.) As millions of anti-war protesters across Europe underscored last weekend, Bush was appointed President of the United States, not France.