I can't quite explain why this bothers me so much, but the latest column by the idiot known as Thomas L. Friedman really bothers me. I am so depressed to live in a country where the NY Times can print a columnist who writes such an intellectually dishonest and meretricious column.

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

...

But then France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world, which is why its pose as the new protector of Iraqi representative government — after being so content with Saddam's one-man rule — is so patently cynical.

Ah, yes. America has been so anti-Saddam.

In the mid-1980s the Reagan administration sent current U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein to improve relations between the U.S. and Iraq.

It is laughable for the country that overthrew a democratic government in Iran in 1953, which re-installed a male-only oligarchy in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War, and which props up the Saudi royal family, to protest much about democracy in the Middle East.

So Americans expect France to not act in its own interest, or to not tell us when we're being stupid? They're evil for not making it easy enough for us to give Saddam Hussein ultimatums? Ultimatums for what? Admitting to weapons that apparently don't exist?

James and I spent a lot of the last week hanging out with a couple of young artist/musicians from France. They were very upset when they saw t-shirts for sale in Times Square that said, "Iraq First, Then France." This country is really scaring me. Is it going to be "us" against the world?