Thanks to fellow blogger Stef for finding and displaying the information below.
The CIA publishes, among other things, information about the current accounts of the balance of payments for different countries. What is interesting in this information is that the countries who led the war against Iraq have actually the worst balance of payments.
The current account of the balance of payments is the sum of the balance of trade (exports minus imports of goods and services), net factor income (such as interest and dividends) and net transfer payments (such as foreign aid). A current account surplus increases a country's net foreign assets by the corresponding amount, and a current account deficit does the reverse. Both government and private payments are included in the calculation.
We know very well that Jacques Chirac did not go to war against Saddam, not because of some humanitarian principle but because of Chirac's proximity with eminent sunni Arab Politcians including Saddam. Rumsfeld and the US had the same old friendship with Saddam but everybody knows that the US treats its friends very badly . We also know that Sarkozy, the new french president, was sorry for Chirac's attitude toward the US at the onset of the Iraq war and always wanted to apologize. Well now that he is a president, he may be able to apologize in a very special way and France's attitude toward US wars in the ME might change very quickly.
There is actually a war being prepared by the neocons, it is the war against Iran which entered, according to some specialists, its final phase, and Sarkozy is impatient to embark on this one. First, he is going to choose as his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, the liberal French doctor who advocates conflicts for the purpose of Humanitarian intervention and who was an advocate for the Iraq war. At the same time, Sarkozy is preparing the public opinion for a long war like the one the US is waging in Iraq. He asked that a text written by communist French resistant Guy Mocquet to his parents, while he was 17 and fighting in the French resistance to the Nazi occupation, be read by college students. Although the wars against Iraq or Iran are colonial wars and not wars of resistance, Sarkozy has been defending, all along his campaign for presidency, colonial wars as civilizing missions. And although Sarkozy is a neocon, it does not bother him to read a text written by a communist. Indeed neocons have revealed themselves as much dogmatic and indoctrinating as old commies. Because despite the demise of the communist party, communist resistance to Nazis in France is part of the common glorious history of the nation and its identity. An identity Sarkozy wants to restore to the French people by pitting them against immigrants...He even alluded that this loss of identity is due to immigration by creating a ministry for national identity and immigration.
The letter of Guy Mocquet goes like this (my translation): My Life was short.
«[...] I am going to die! All I ask and all I want from you my 'petite maman' is to be courageous, which is how I am right now, exactly as other brave people before me. My natural choice was to live. But from the bottom of my heart I hope now that my death can serve a purpose. [...] 'Petit papa', I take my leave from you, for the last time, knowing all the sorrow I caused to both of you. I want you to know that I did my best to follow the path you traced for me. I send my adieu to all my friends and to my brother whom I love very much. I want him to study hard and to become a worthy man. Seventeen and a half, my life was so short. I regret nothing except leaving you all. I am going to die. [...] I embrace you with a child's heart. Courage ! [...]»
Read here my article about the moral dilemma of our modern societies sending their children to war. Sarkozy is not going to make France any better...He is going to hide France's ailing economy and his inability to do anything about it by sending France's youths to wars against foreign countries. This is the core idea of the new triumphant capital. After having failed to deliver on economic progress and reforms, the new capital, aided by the neocon ideology, conducts policies of wars, not only to hide the ailing economy but to subjugate the working and struggling classes and silence their dissent. Sarkozy has already shown us his colours, from his vacation on the yacht of the billionnaire Vincent Bolloré to his choice of the young Guy Mocquet letter, and to his closeness to Tony Blair, the man who played second fiddle to George Bush and the neocons and who is happy with the election of Sarkozy and cannot wait to meet with him as a president. Blair will be giving Sarkozy some advise on how to lie into going to war and staying the course. Sarkozy will surpass Blair as a neocon, he already stifled rational debate in France while thriving on the misery and the divisions of the French people....He will build his popularity exactly like celebrities by radicalising the presidency around his persona, provoking, instead of rational debate, flat admiration, hate or indignation, all of which contributing to his omnipresence in the media and the minds of the French people who will become obsessed and addicted to him for some time to come...Sarkozy strives for our attention, negative or positive, and his policies will thrive on the bed of hate and indignation...
The only way to counter Sarkozy is to fight him on facts without emotions, positive or negative, without rethoric, without sentiments, without anger. Because he will be seeking to provoke, above everything else, sentiments and emotions, in order to stifle rational debate. We have an arduous task before us and we have the obligation to do it well for the sake of France's destiny and the destiny of its people...
P.S. Bush threatens Iran with new sanctions
Since March 29th 2006