Your first guess is wrong – this quote is not from a new Wikileaks document alleging stormy diplomatic relations between France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy and the White House.
Rather, it is a quote from an 1865 letter by British diplomat Sir Frederick Bruce, summarizing a conversation on US-France relations with President Andrew Johnson.
The “quarrel” that Bruce’s letter mentions refers to US anger over France’s military intervention in Mexico during the 1860s. Small-r American republicans saw this as an effort by Napoleon III to bring back absolute monarchy to the Western Hemisphere at bayonet point, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine.
Nicholas Sarkozy does not (yet) compare himself with Napoleon III – but some of his critics call him “Sarkoleon.” This is partly a joke about Sarkozy’s height, and partly a warning about his thirst for military intervention. If you can believe it, France is now fighting six wars at the same time.
Unlike Napoleon III, who didn’t hide the fact that his Mexican adventure was a pure power play, Sarkoleon claims that all his military interventions are in the name of unselfish, wholesome humanitarian motives.
Some people donate money to charity to make the world a better place; Sarkozy seems to see his wars in the same way. The more wars he can donate, so to speak, the more quickly the world will improve.
A close ally of Sarkoleon, French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, used a March 25th interview to explain Sarkoleon’s humanitarian need to bomb Libya as follows:
Levy doesn’t just spin for Sarkoleon – he also carries out defensive political plays against the President’s critics. Anyone who disagrees with Sarkoleon is, according to Levy, trying to sabotage the Great Man with “flood of quibbling and neo-Munichesque blah-blah-blah.”
Remember – if you oppose Sarkozy, that means you would have appeased Adolf Hitler, as the Western powers did at Munich.
Sarkozy and Levy see France’s humanitarian wars as a great adventure to remake the world and institute a new global order. If this is your goal, then the related financial costs, and casualties, and the hardships that wars (even humanitarian wars) can inflict on civilian populations don’t mean much.
But for any real patriot, wary of seeing his country plunged into unnecessary conflicts abroad, reluctant to see the nation’s treasure and manpower squandered, the only true way to look at war is how General William T. Sherman saw it. That is, “war is hell.”
If war is ever necessary, a patriot would see it as being waged only in self-defense, to protect precise national interests – and certainly not to uphold some fashionable theory about how the world ought to work.
If President Obama needs a graceful way to turn down any demand from Sarkoleon (or Levy) for further US participation in France’s wars, he can draw inspiration from an old Samuel Goldwyn line – “Gentlemen, include me out!”
