And the cab driver asked “so what do you think of the French bombing Libya?”
A Gonzo piece on Nicolas and Muammar…
Last week I was on a cab en route to the airport when my driver asked “so what do you think of the French bombing Libya?”
Coincidental conversation starter, as I was absorbed in reading 2 good opposed pieces on the topic: Juan Cole’s Open Letter To The Left On Libya arguing in favour of the intervention, and @Dr_Tad post explaining that there is an other alternative.
So the discussion started with the usual caveat about “things being complicated”. The driver quickly moved to a dislike of military brute force, balanced by the need to “do something”:
- There are too many examples of “dictators brutalising their own people”. Trouble is often refuse action beyond “strongly condemning.” (see: Darfur, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Burma, etc)
- The Arabs are suspicious of military action. Especially US led. They have a long list of past experiences to justify that suspicion. And we are not just talking about Iraq. It goes back several decades. Back to the Suez crisis, etc.
- On the other hand, being systemically opposed to military intervention, no matter what, is a difficult position to hold. No one likes war but past situations such as Rwanda showed that not using our big guns can lead to humanitarian disaster.
- Gaddafi is bad. (That was easy).
- Where are you going? (Qantas Terminal).
- This time it’s different. Unlike Iraq, there seems to be strong support from other Arab nations for this action
- Anyway. Once again. It’s all about oil. Did you see that story about BP to start deep-water oil drilling off the coast of Libya within weeks?
Conclusion from the authoritative cabbie: this conflict looks totally ’schuschpischous’.
When Sarkozy was selling Nukes and weapons to Gaddafi – on the French “Spitting Image” “Les Guignols” (click to play)
However I also wondered if another way to gauge Nicolas Sarkozy’s motives to push so hard was to observe what it has done to the French domestic debate. A lot of annoying issues for the government have simply gone off the radar.
Starting with the embarrassment of being seen as picking the wrong side in Tunisia, which has disappeared from the headlines. The economic issues faced by Greece or Ireland have also been totally forgotten. Even Japan nuclear accident threatening the official government line on the energy agenda is getting less air time.
So without giving into paranoid conspiracy, you have to admit that this whole “odyssey” is giving a few people some timely relief one year before the French presidential election.
“You mean like in that movie with Robert De Niro? What was the name again?… Wag the Dog!”
Exactly. Just like in “that movie with Robert De Niro” in which the White House declared war in the run-up to an election. Robert De Niro stars as a political consultant who covers up a presidential sex scandal and gets his boss re-elected by launching a fake war in Albania.
Of course in real Sarko-life there is no sex scandal and Gaddafi’s dictatorship is not fake. However like in the movie this war turns out to be very convenient for the modern-time Napoleon, as Sarkozy is often portrayed.
Firstly, he is facing the lowest approval ratings a French President ever had in the past 60 years because of a mix of regressive policies and ostentatious personality. The vernacular “bling-bling” has even been borrowed from the urban lexicon to describe his style. Like the sound of bold gold necklaces wore by hip-hop stars. It comes with visible relationships with rich businessmen, fondness for wearing brands, taking vacations on luxury yachts, weak public morality, bad manners and an alarming inability to control his emotions, although renamed frankness by his storytellers.
The trouble is that this “bling-bling” word seems to be his only legacy so far. Politically he is loosing ground to the far-right after embracing xenophobic policies in hope of attracting extremist voters. This dangerous experiment is turning into a total failure: the National Front has been growing stronger, and the center right (Christian democrats) are absolutely mad at him.
So this war in Libya is meant to be his rendez-vous with history. He made the emotional call to listen to Bernard-Henri Lévy, a self-appointed intellectual-at-large, who introduced him to the Benghazi rebels. Even his own foreign minister was taken by surprised when he learnt that France was committing to war!
The second winner of this Libyan adventure could be the Nuclear industry. With 58 units generating 75% of the national electricity, the sector is like a state within the state in France. Decided in a week (literally) after the 1973 oil crisis, the French nuclear program has remained unquestioned for 40 years.
- Remember the Chernobyl radioactive cloud in 1986? It magically stopped right at the border.
- Have you heard of the emergency evacuation plan around the power plants, especially the one 80 km from Paris? Well, incidents better be contained within a small perimeter. The plan says “The emergency planning zone of 5 km radius around a nuclear power plant is the zone where evacuation is pre-planned and prepared in detail.”
Needless to say that Energy and Environment ministers, the Power Company EDF and the fuel provider Areva are not particularly looking forward to a review of the nuclear policies under public pressure. Nuclear safety will be tabled at the next G-20 summit, but the shift in media attention thanks to the megalomaniac colonel, might spare the pain of the intense public scrutiny.
Finally we agreed that the 3rd winner of this remake of a Taxi for Tobruk is the almighty business-as-usual agenda. Even the cab driver remembered Sarkozy’s pompous declaration to end “le laissez faire” in 2008! And just like in the Hollywood movie the cabbie’s conclusion was that changing the system was a bone too big to chew, which would not give any serious electoral benefits. Sarkozy would be better off letting the central bankers deal with the “Bank Stress Tests” that will not change anything anyway. It sounds like my cab driver could get a job at the Elysée!
So we reached destination and the conclusion of this taxi conversation at the same time. Like Napoleon who moved from one battle field to the other until his luck eventually ran out, Sarkozy might be looking for good fortune in Libya. The analogy with a young Bonaparte embarking on a military expedition to Egypt makes it even more spooky.
Of course this intervention is no laughing matter, nor should the rest of the presidential agenda be. But the way his majority party got defeated at this weekend’s local elections can only indicate that more stunts are to be expected from Sarko-leon.
{ NKN & leLaissezFaire }
Further reading:
- Juan Cole’s Open Letter To The Left On Libya arguing in favour of the intervention
- @Dr_Tad post explaining that there is an other alternative
- @elkapitalista on The Libya Problem For The Left: http://elkapitalista.tumblr.com/post/4199488419/the-libya-problem-for-the-left
- Slate asks a very similar question (who isn’t?) and also references “Wag the Dog” in this nice piece “Wag le Chien: Did French President Nicolas Sarkozy push the Libyan intervention to boost his re-election bid? (A French version can be found on Rue89)
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