Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Highlights of the (not so) silly season

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"PARIS - The war on Iraq has been officially erased ... in France. It has simply disappeared from the mainstream press and from the nightly news. The feat cannot be entirely attributed to the summer silly season - especially in a country where most people are entitled to at least 36 days of paid holidays a year (Americans mostly get a meager week or so). Once again, it's up to the adrenalin-junkie, vertically challenged nouveau President Nicolas Sarkozy, the best-loved Frenchman in the US since Lafayette.

Way beyond the ghastly weather provoking an additional torrent of editorials on global warming, jogger-in-chief Sarkozy was able to bury France's fierce opposition to the war on Iraq by visiting lame-duck-in-chief George W Bush in W's father's cozy retreat in Maine. Long gone are the February 2003 days of former prime minister Dominique de Villepin humiliating secretary of state Colin Powell (and receiving a five-minute ovation) at the United Nations Security Council, when grumpy "old Europe" was pitted against those gung-ho libertarians bent on bringing "freedom" to "the Iraqi people".

The Bush-Sarko grill - animated by informal burgers and French (not "freedom") fries - may have sealed the end of "old Europe", but in notoriously wary France, the real talk of the town (and the street markets) was why the preppy-dressed Sarko was not joined by his wife Cecilia, a former Elsa Schiaparelli model....."

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