Redstate

By Mark Kilmer Posted in User Blogs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Another look at the new French Prime Minister, the poet Dominique de Villepin, is from Iranian writer Amer Taheri, writing in February of 2004, when the poet de Villepin was French foreign minister opposing the invasion of Iraq.

"Two visions of the world confront one another," he writes. "Do not make any mistake: the choice is between two visions of the world."

At no point, however, does Villepin take the trouble to tell us what these two rival visions are. The reason is that he does not have a clue. He applies what is a religious dialectics to politics.

He sees no contradiction between his championship of a multi-polar world, whatever that means, and his claim that mankind has the choice of only two visions: one French, the other American. Worse still he seems not to understand the difference between foreign policy and international affairs.

The poet de Villepin sees France always favoring thoughtful negotiations, while the United State lumbers in with its muscle and might to crush the opposition.  He has a false Athens/Sparta redux going, and it works only with the bull-headed lefties who believe what has already been placed in their heads by less benevolent lefties.  (I won't drag Michael Isikoff into this.)

So it is a garbage worldview we get from the poet de Villepin, a sort of Vedrine-for-Dummies.  It plays well with Frances self-image, but not with reality.  Who has taken most, almost all, of the positive diplomatic initiatives in, narrowing it down to recently, the past twenty years?  It was not France.  It was not the United Nations.

It was the United States of America.

And as I pointed out yesterday, and as Taheri also notes, the multi-polar world imagined by Vedrine/Chirac/Villepin is actually a bipolar world: the United States VERSUS...  and it could be the U.S. vs. the E.U., the U.S. vs. France, or the U.S. vs. the Franco-German axis.

As undiplomatic as this might sound, and acknowledging that I am a U.S. partisan, the poet de Villepin conjures a swarm of gnats, filling the paths betwixt the body and the cool breeze, only to be scraped away and planted with a SPLOTT on the firm soil below.