The Diplomad has brought to my attention an article written in The National Post about France and it’s own war with the Ivory Coast.
For those of you not to hip on the history of this Country there is good synopsis here. Basically France occupied this country as a trade route in the 1840’s and completed their conquest in the 1890’s after a protracted war with the local forces. Since then the French control this country.
“This month, French peacekeepers in the former French colony launched a pre-emptive assault against the Ivorian air force. They also interfered with the internal politics of the troubled nation and sought regime change — or at least they have been accused of both by President Laurent Gbagbo.
They acted without authorization by the United Nations Security Council.
They violated both the UN Charter and the terms of the peacekeeping resolution that established their specific mission in the West African nation.
The Security Council did sanction their attacks after the fact. Nonetheless, the French acted unilaterally, and only sought and received a UN cover story later. There wasn’t even a coalition of the willing. No Brits, Aussies, Poles or Dutch to help out; just French troops, jets, helicopters and armored personnel carriers.
While the French have achieved their military goals quickly and easily, they have failed to stop the destruction of much of the I.C.’s infrastructure.
They have been powerless to end a Muslim insurgency that controls half of Ivory Coast’s territory. They have stood by while schools and libraries were torched, failed to prevent widespread looting and have even fired on civilian mobs twice, killing as many as 60 Ivorians. And they have hardly been welcomed as liberators by the locals.”
“So where are the campus radicals, the smug Western intellectuals and the preening pundits with their accusations of blood for chocolate? Where is their accusation that the whole thing has just been a giant conspiracy to ensure French President Jacques Chirac’s buddies in the chocolate industry have all the cheap cocoa butter they want?
There has been no media talk of quagmire, even though the French have been involved in the I.C.’s civil war for nearly three years. The French military intervention proceeded for the first 17 months without any UN authorization whatever. And the Chirac government has repeatedly escalated its troop commitment from 500 in 2002, to 2,500 in 2003, to 4,000 earlier this year, to 5,000 today. And the situation only worsens.
Where is their outrage at the inability of French forces to secure instantly and perfectly every block of the Ivory Coast’s teeming cities? Where are the BBC interviews with Secretary-General Kofi Annan declaring the French adventure “illegal,” as he did concerning the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq? Where are the letters from Annan to Chirac entreating him not to quell the insurgency or crush the forces fighting French troops for fear of provoking worse from the locals, the way he cautioned the Americans against pacifying Falluja.”
“What’s galling is the way the French have done it all without any deference to the multilateral consensus-building they so smugly demanded of the Americans and British last year when the boots were on the other feet.
Doubly galling is the silence — even complicity — of the UN and the international community, which last year so sanctimoniously and vocally obstructed the invasion of Iraq.”
Hmmm, where is the UN now? What pisses me off is that the US supported the French in the UN for this action, why we would do this after the abuse we took from the corrupt French is beyond me.
