Before 9/11, my only exposure to France as an international player was that joke about the “French Army rifle for sale: Never fired, only dropped once.” I also knew the French gave us the Statue of Liberty. We both have an affinity for liberty and mythologizing our emancipatory revolutions.
After 9/11, the French poured out their support. We were reminded of this via social media last week. Curiously absent, though, was any allusion to the anti-French furor that followed 9/11. I wondered if millennials younger than I appreciated how mind-blowing our selective memory appears to be when it comes to our relationship with France over the past decade, particularly in the context of ISIS and military engagement in the Middle East.
Based on the breadth and outpouring of online support for and commiseration with the French over the past week, I figure there had to be some crossover among Americans who were as angry with the French a decade ago as they are supportive today.
It might be easy for some to forget that, under the lead of the Bush administration, America’s official demeanor toward the French was hatred as we geared up to go to war with Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld implied the French were cowardly “old Europe.” Conservative critics applied the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” label, a Bart Simpson joke term, to the “old Europe” ally for questioning the logic of engaging in that particular war.
A bit of context: In what reads like an ominous forecast of the 12 years that would follow, satirical newspaper The Onion mocked the debate over whether to wage war in Iraq in a point-counterpoint piece entitled, “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t.”
Here we are over a decade later: A number of extremist groups born, emboldened, inspired and weaponized thanks in part to that instability. Paris is one of the many wounded in just the past few weeks.
The revisionism, or impairment to our long-term memory, doesn’t end with our oscillating relationship with the French. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “America’s Mayor,” is now saying Obama is to blame for ISIS, which is again doubly ironic.
In the 2008 presidential election, Giuliani became a parody of himself by dropping 9/11 as his answer to most everything. It became so comical it’s almost hard to recall that he was once rumored to be a frontrunner. He was disgraced in a GOP debate, though, when Ron Paul denounced Giuliani’s foreign policy positions for ignoring the concept of “blowback,” a phenomenon acknowledged to be real by CIA Director John Brennan. In short, what we put out into the world by way of force finds its way back to us. We now find ourselves on the receiving end of said blowback.
“We are under attack. We need to respond.” I’ve heard this over and over in the past week, an echo of the aftermath of 9/11.
But how and with what? Will a Congress with a single-digit favorability rating and a penchant for playing chicken over whether we pay our bills oversee that? Are we to trust this body with overseeing sustainable and thoughtfully considered military policy?
The last time we earnestly asked these questions, we forgot to consider maintaining regional stability as part of the equation. We were OK with dropping bombs and sending troops but squeamish about building nations. Our main export became instability.
The goal of terrorism is to get large powers to exhaust resources on disproportionately small threats. To encourage us to lose our way by way of freedom, liberty and compassion. We often prove to be easily goaded into acting accordingly and leaving everything in our path in disarray. It is that disarray, it turns out, that breeds further chaos.
Our present moment is defined by this lack of stability, much of which we’ve contributed to out of fear from feeling out of control.
As we wonder what we can do to respond to make us safer in a broader sense, let’s consider how we create balance rather than further disrupting stability. This isn’t achievable by giving refugees nowhere to go or upping collateral damage counts. We can’t achieve balance by falling into traps by acting like tyrants and cheering on xenophobia. If it were — with all these governors flexing symbolic, idiotic point-scoring muscles and all these members of Congress ready to drop bombs without heeding the resultant mess — our present moment would be one of unprecedented peace.
Our arrogance, our readiness to engage indefinitely and the comfort we take in the swiftness with which we can level a region does not make us any safer. Instead of using destruction as a metric for success, we would do well to consider what is worth creating.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
