Oysters and Foie Gras and, By the Way, Saddam Was Hanged
Saddam Hussein, second from left, and Jacques Chirac, right, confer in Iraq's French-built nuclear power plant in the 1970s.
The general tone of French media today is world weary--they hung Saddam, the violence continues, ferry boat accident off the coast of Java, foie gras and oysters...and wise guys.
Ho-hum they hung Saddam: subdued reactions in Iraq, severe condemnation in Europe, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Hamastan and, most vehemently, in French think tanks.
Europeans do not believe in capital punishment, democratic nations do not practice capital punishment, but then again, it wasn't really the Iraqis who hung Saddam, it was the Americans, it was George Booooosh. And hanging Saddam is a sign of Booooosh's weakness (he should know that democratic countries don't execute criminals). Besides how uncouth to do it on the dawn of this supremely holy day
when Muslims commemorate the Sacrifice. Saddam will become a hero and a martyr. He went to his death with calm dignity. The Arab street isn’t going to like this.
Humph, okay the Americans, the Iranians, and the Israelis approved… but that just goes to show you. The trial was not fair. Sunnis won’t swallow it: a Kurdish judge sentencing the Great Sunni Saddam to death? Pffft! An Iraqi in America says it’s a great day, but we have Iraqis in France and they agree with our local think tankers: the whole thing was botched.
As a matter of fact, French media were near-unanimous yesterday in predicting that Saddam wouldn’t he hung for weeks, maybe never. I knew he would be hung at dawn but I didn’t write a letter to Le Monde to set them straight.
No one dared to pretend that Libya, Saudia Arabia, and Hamastan are against capital punishment, but their indignation was not any the less righteous for it. The trial was a hoax (says one of Saddam’s lawyers), and besides, what about the hundreds of thousands of other victims of his great dictatorship? Now they won’t be vindicated, there won’t be any more trials.
One think tanker explains: of course they didn’t want to go into the details because it would reveal Western support, primarily American, for Saddam. Yes, Chirac too, but we don’t have to dwell on that. Not when we have new images of mangled bloody charred bodies in the latest car bomb attack in Baghdad. Ha ha ha — the violence continues. More American military deaths in Iraq than civilian deaths on 9/11, continuing Shia-Sunni violence in Iraq, Boooosh lost the midterm elections, nothing good will come of this barbaric hanging. Oh yes, Saddam was a rough & tough killer. But the French media have never told a tenth of what he did, and now that he is dead, don’t expect any retrospectives.
France 3, so dignified that the newscaster almost sprouted wings, chose NOT to show certain images of the hanging (the part where they put the rope around his neck).
Condemnations flowed thick and thin from NGOs, the Vatican, residents of Tikrit, a correspondent in Jordan, a specialist on conflicts.
One talking head, looking down on the whole sordid affair, opined that Saddam was a has-been, the new heroes are Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad… So this reporter blew her top, beat her chest, whooped and hollered at the glassy screen: “Don’t you get it, numbskull? We’re going to kill them too!”
The old refrain “They still haven’t found Osama Bin Laden” was not played today. Maybe they think the grim reaper harvested him… without a trial. No one thought to mention that Saddam was hung privately, unlike his victims who swung in public squares, when they weren’t fed alive into giant shredders, hacked to bits in front of their raped children, tossed from tall buildings…
All the torture stories had been used up…for Pinochet.
Were the French world weary when Saddam gassed thousands of Kurds?
Were the French world weary when Saddam set fire to Kuwaiti oil fields? Were the French world weary when Saddam massacred thousands of innocent Iraqis ?
Were the French world weary when Saddam traded oil for weapons?
How insignificant and insufferably stupid the French are.
May they find themselves in need of assistance to salvage their worthless lives and the west have the luxury of telling whichever clueless Socialist is trying to manage their world weary population, ” too bad , we don’t care about your useless country”
so what’s your problem you deaf dumb and blind wankers?
It’s sort of interesting to think what might have happened if Saddam would have heeded George Bush’s threats three years ago and given up power, in turn for sanctuary out of Iraq — perhaps in some sophisticated nation like France.
He could have taken his billions and settled into French liberal society and been a French hero. The women folk in Saddam’s family could have spent their time shopping with Arafat’s wife. Uday and Osay might have had to cut back their rape activities a bit, but they could have still been favorites among the storied Paris whores.
Saddam would have been the toast of the French intellectual scene. Democratic politicians would have flocked to him for personal consultations, just like they flock to visit Boy Assad.
But he chose to listen to the French and Russians, who assured him they would be abale to get George Bush to back down.
Bad decision.
the world-weariness dripping off the long-nose of the french is a symptom of left-wing philosphy. When a belief system has no intellectual basis and is becoming fosslized all one can do is sniff a sniff of tragic superiority. The left in the U.S. is no different, they just can’t sniff as well as the french, no one can.
Considering that the French were still chopping people’s heads off as late as 1977 and the Germans have certainly made their bones for several centuries; they both sure can get very high handed when the single worst killer of Islamic people finally gets his just desserts.
The Fwench yell bloody murder now that the oil for food cash cow bought the farm.While in the back ground their country is being burned to the ground and they don’t lift a finger to stop it.This type of coward can only flail words at their enemy’s.Action would be to intelligent,and dare I say it! BRAVE.
Oh well, the French are not accountable. Chirac called Saddam a close personal friend when he sold the dictator a nuclear reactor. but that was then and then is now….
I dont know why anyone is surprised by the French respones. Or the Euro weenies as well. Saddam was their sugar daddy. Billions in oil contracts.
(Note no one seems to mention Total Fina Elf when disccussing “Blood For Oil” Ask any liberal, they conviently have no clue who that is, or why they should care.)
Billions in Arms. And that just the stuff that was legal. Add to this the kickbacks, hush money, and bribes and you see Saddam was a Eurotrash ATM machine. The French in particular constantly punch their pin number.
Screw em I say. I am just surprised they werent there going through the pockets of a cold dead Saddam looking for any loose change before they put him in the ground.
Were the French world weary when Saddam gassed thousands of Kurds?
Naw, like the Americans, they were too busy selling him the gas.
That animal deserved DEATH when he was responsible for the very first child being tortured or imprisoned YEARS AGO. How many lives had to be ruined? RUINED—before the bed-wetting Liberals of the world would say its OK for this (himself an abused child) sad, sad animal to pay the ultimate price for his crimes? I think he was too mentally deteriorated to truly understand what was being done to him, but IT HAD TO BE DONE FOR THE GOOD OF DEMOCRACY in that troubled region. Prayers for his victims, and champagne for everyone!
Chirac called Saddam a close personal friend when he sold the dictator a nuclear reactor.
Yes, and there are pictures of Rumsfeld and others from our side playing kissyface with Saddam as well.
Ms. Alkon, Rumsfeld may have been playing “kissface” with Saddam, but Chiirac qas building him a nuclear reactor. If you think that’s equivalent, you’re living on Pluto.
Chirac called Saddam a close personal friend…
Well, Jimmy Carter called Nicolae Ceausescu a “freedom fighter” and Nixon had some nice things to say about him, too. You can’t take these things too seriously because a certain amount of whoring is de rigeur.
Right on Ellen. Those liberal traitors seem to keep forgetting how Saddam attacked the US on 9/11.
@Tom Dubya:
Perhaps the strangest of liberals’ intellectual weaknesses is their inability to distinguish the difference between “plotting 9/11″ versus “harboring, training, and abetting terrorists.”
It’s what makes them such an endless source of unintentional humor:
“Conservatives think ‘X’! What a bunch of morons!”
“No, we think, ‘The integral of X between times t and t + n.’”
“There! See? Conservatives think ‘X’! What a bunch of morons!”
I’m reminded of a line from Fish Called Wanda, paraphrased: “Yes, stupid people do read philosophy, they just don’t understand it.”
The United States and Great Britain supported Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War II. Not only did we coordinate military strategy with Stalin, we shipped the USSR thousands of tons of military supplies including almost half a million trucks and fighter planes as well.
If I need to point it out, Stalin murdered between 30 and 60 million of his own countrymen, depending on which book you read. And he did most of this before WWII.
So was it then illegitimate for us to oppose the Soviet Union during the Cold War?
All of you libs answer that one for me.
The bottom line is that it was right for us to support the Soviet Union against the Nazis and it was right for us to support Iraq over Iran. During WWII Nazi Germany was the greater threat and during the early 80s Iran was the greater threat.
Yes I know that Iraq started the war with Iran. Let’s just keep in mind that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in Sept 1939 along with Germany. And then there’s the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact The Soviets were hardly complete victims during the war.
Yet we helped the Soviets defeat the Nazis. Again, did this somehow make it wrong for us to oppose the Soviets later?
Harboring and training? Another wingnut fantasy. Aside from giving the FAMILIES of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 each which probably amounted to no more than 5 or 10 million in total, Saddam hadn’t backed terrorists since Abu Nidal, in the ’80′s, when the US was selling him poison gas.
Uh, wrong Tom Dubya. Look up Salman Pak.
A claim based on two Iraqi defectors one of whom was found later to be an imposter?
Also a November 2003 DIA intelligence assessment stated that “we do not know whether ex-regime trained terrorists on the aircraft at Salman Pak”
All in all a pretty pathetic excuse for a war….
Tom_Dubya, let me make this very simple for you:
In 1991 Saddam Hussein signed a cease fire with the allied forces to stop the war at the time. The two most important terms of this ceasefire were as follows:
1) completely disarm and destroy all chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs and stockpiles.
2) allow verified searches of any facility to confirm the destruction of said weapons.
Still with me? Good.
Now Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. I’ll say it again for you. Nothing at all.
Still with me? Good.
Now as soon Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, defied 19 UN resolutions, and restarted the programs in question, the cease fire is null and void.
Which means…that’s right… a state of war thus resumes between the two countries. (Which is probably the reason that Clinton made regime change in Iraq a stated goal of the US Gov’t in ’98.)
My whole problem with using ‘weapons stockpiles’ as a reason for going to war was that it only served to confuse people like you who seem unable to grasp the complex concept that is a ‘cease fire agreement’. There was no other justification needed on a global scale for resuming full hostilities.
Still with me? Good.
Now we can wax philisophic about whether or not we should have gone to war when we did. But the idea that it was somehow ‘illegal’ or ‘unjustified’ is asinine. (I’m not indicating this is your position, I’m just pointing out the obvious).
Post 9/11, the onus was on Saddam and Saddam ALONE to prove beyond any doubt that all the agreed upon terms in the cease fire were being followed.
If your comfortable with him having these active programs (Again, NOT STOCKPILES. I know this confuses the hell out of most liberals but having active programs (which, even the iraq report indicated all were active) was a major violation of the cease fire and more than enough justificastion for all out war)) in a country that was a hostile to the U.S as Iraq, then it’s your decision.
But it’s not outlandish to understand why a good portion of the country would want to dismantle this regime post 9/11.
AGAIN, NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 ITSELF.
Does that clear things up a bit for you?
“Now as soon Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, defied 19 UN resolutions, and restarted the programs in question, the cease fire is null and void.”
Wrong. The ceasefire would have been null and void had the Security Council decided it was null and void. They didn’t.
It is true that Saddam violated UN resolutions, it is also true that the US violated the UN Charter.
“My whole problem with using ‘weapons stockpiles’ as a reason for going to war was that it only served to confuse people like you who seem unable to grasp the complex concept that is a ‘cease fire agreement’.
You seem to imply that any violation of a ceasefire justifies war, which is of course absurd.