Why Americans always lose

"I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground," Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, illustration by Milo Winter (c. 1912)

Mark Steyn was right when he wrote that "even a surrender monkey can wind up king of the swingers." More on that below, but first, the proof of the pudding we caught on the CBS pre-dawn news show this morning: 

In my survey, I asked respondents to name the world leaders they most admired," Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution told the CBS interviewer, citing a recent survey he conducted in six Arab countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.

Before he said another word, we knew the answers:  Most hated=Bush, most admired=Chirac.  We were off by only half a shekel:  Bush was second most hated (and you-know-who -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- was number one), but sure enough, right up there with Saddam and Osama, was The Worm himself, Jacques Chirac, "despite the fact that he has banned the veil in French schools": 

The common image running through these choices is that of a leader defying the United States.

Curiously, Telhami asserts "Respondents to my survey believe that the war in Iraq has made the region even less democratic."  How can a region that is undemocratic to start with become less democratic? But back to Mark Steyn's eye-opening analysis of what France is really up to and how M. Chirac is winning the "hearts and minds" of the "global community":

You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies. If you make sure the embryo institutions of world government are built in France’s image, America’s strength will be as irrelevant as that of the class freak or the town misfit.

In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia or the Hindu Kush. And, on this terrain, Paris figures, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the first Gulf War. Through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It’s time the rest of us were so clear-sighted.

Touché!

Comments

[pam]

Wow. That's pretty powerful... though I'm not totally surprised.

What would happen if we just stopped? If we did what so many countries do, and closed our borders, stayed at home, kept our billions and billions of dollars in aid and flipped off the rest of the world that not only hates our President, but pretty much every one of us?

I can dream, can't I? ;)

[goomp]

Chirac better hope he is not successful. Europe is fully infiltrated by terrorist groups waiting for the US to fail and withdraw. Then they are ready to eliminate Europe as a western civilization.