FRANCE/COMMENTARY: Perhaps Americans should look in their own closet before whipping the French with history in the current quarrel over policy towards Iraq, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Judging from the things he reads in the newspapers, the French ambassador to Washington, Mr Jean-David Levitte, wrote a few days ago, "I sometimes wonder whether the impending war is not between France and the United States." He barely exaggerated.
"Iraq first, France next" is a favourite slogan of American Francophobes.
With every week the Iraq crisis drags on, the chasm between Paris and Washington grows deeper. Applause for the French Foreign Minister, Mr Dominique de Villepin, in the UN Security Council last Friday, and placards saying "France is Right", carried by anti-war demonstrators in New York on Sunday, must have infuriated the Bush Administration. Mr de Villepin joins Nelson Mandela as one of the few statesmen applauded in the council.
In recent days, the French have been described as venal and smelly, monkeys and weasels; President Jacques Chirac as a rat and a pygmy. From the tone of the invective, one might think France was threatening to use nuclear weapons in a war ostensibly meant to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. But it's the US Strategic Command - not planners in the French Defence Ministry in the rue Saint Dominique - that lists potential Iraqi targets in its "Theatre Nuclear Planning Document." It was President Bush - not Mr Chirac - who signed Directive 17 last September, authorising the use of tactical nuclear weapons should Saddam Hussein stage a chemical or biological attack.
Yet there is talk of stripping France of its seat on the Security Council and giving it to India or the hopelessly divided EU. US congressmen want to boycott French wine and mineral water and the Le Bourget air show. The trade weapon cuts both ways: in Paris, shopkeepers say groceries and clothing with stars and stripes logos have become unsaleable at any discount.
In Britain and Ireland, anti-war feeling is directed at the Bush administration, not America as a nation. Between the US and France, it's personal, and likely to leave long-term damage.
In view of the abuse heaped upon them, the French remain remarkably restrained. "Cowboy" and "messianic" are the usual insults levelled at the US President, though at least one high-ranking official is said to refer to "the Taliban in the White House". For secular France, the religiosity of the Bush Administration is shocking.
What are we meant to make of a CIA director who says, as Mr George Tenet did this month at the 51st annual National Prayer Breakfast, "God teaches us to be resolute in the face of evil, using all of the weapons and armour that the word of God supplies"?
In their fixation on what they see as French perfidy, US columnists and British tabloids do not even address Mr Chirac's argument: that Iraq, in its present condition and under the constant scrutiny of weapons inspectors, does not represent a substantial threat to world security, and that the risks created by unleashing a war of incalculable consequences outweigh the risks of continuing disarmament by peaceful means. Advocates of war say between 80,000 and 150,000 people are expected to die in the impending conflict, many of them civilians. The Bush Administration thinks it's worth it.
It does not acknowledge that, as Paris says repeatedly, wicked regimes have crumbled without war. Witness the former Soviet Union, apartheid in South Africa and Latin American dictatorships.
Then there is the constant harping on the second World War. By opposing war against Iraq, Germany and France are somehow reverting to character, goes the historically flawed argument.
As the US columnist Mary McGrory said on RTÉ at the weekend, Washington should be delighted that Germany, with its dreadful modern history, is now a peace-loving country. Neither the US nor Britain has ever been occupied; neither Mr Bush nor Mr Blair has fought in a war. "Old Europe", Mr de Villepin reminded the Security Council, "has known wars, occupation and barbarity". In response to scathing allegations of French ingratitude, he added that France "does not forget and knows everything it owes to the freedom fighters who came from America and elsewhere".
The French have refrained from reminding Washington how US diplomats slobbered over Marshal Pétain, referring to "the noble task you have undertaken" in embassy birthday greetings in 1941, or how the US State Department conspired to have Varian Fry, an American who smuggled Jews out of second World War France, arrested and expelled from the country.
None of this excuses Vichy's treatment of Jews, but perhaps Americans should look in their own closet before whipping the French with history. Nor should we forget how often Paris and Washington quarrelled, only to make up when the crisis passed, or a new administration came to office.
In the wake of the second World War, Roosevelt's abhorrence of colonialism was a constant source of transatlantic tension. Eisenhower "betrayed" France and Britain over Suez, and Kennedy condemned the French war in Algeria. De Gaulle got even by criticising the US in Vietnam.
The US boycotted French products in the early 1970s, in protest at Pompidou's Middle East policy.
Washington threw fits when Mitterrand appointed three communist cabinet ministers, and Mitterrand enraged Ronald Reagan by refusing to let US bombers fly over France on their failed mission to assassinate Moammar Gadafy. Now US 'neo-conservatives' threaten that "France will pay" when the Iraq crisis is over.
"You can always rely on [the French] to let you down," a columnist wrote in an Irish Sunday newspaper at the weekend. She should have asked the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 at the behest of George Bush Snr, how reliable they think Washington is. The US allowed Saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the rebellion, and the Kurds and Shiites were slaughtered.
She should ask the Egyptians and Syrians about US reliability; Arab leaders sent troops to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a US promise of justice for the Palestinians once Kuwait was liberated. . .They should have known better.
The French have a saying that "promises commit only those who believe in them". When was the last time Kurds, Shiites, Egyptians, Syrians or Palestinians financed a US election campaign?