We have help from many European nations with us in Iraq, such as Britain and Poland. Over 30 nations are helping us, but people like Kerry dismiss their contributions and insult them as insignificant. I guess he thinks that because France, Germany, Belgium, and Russia aren't behind us, then no one else matters. In his dismissal, I suspect he's pissing off our real allies while pandering to those who aren't allies at all.

I found an interesting article this morning by an American expat who has lived in France for over 30 years. She dearly loves France, but she's getting ready to leave, in part because of the rising antisemitism there. Her comments on the French press are illuminating.

On my return flight—Air France, bien entendu— I pick up a copy of Le Nouvel Observateur. The images of President Bush’s Thanksgiving trip to Iraq are still fresh in my mind. My heart went out to those men and women fighting to defend our lives, our freedom. Would French audiences ever see their shining faces, I wondered? Now, from the cover of the French weekly, a disheartened GI stares out at me, and I have my answer. Iraq: Close-up of a Disaster, reads the headline. We see only the left half of the soldier’s face, full front. His skin is reddened and smudged, sullen defeat veils his blue eyes, his mouth is pouting in reproach. Don’t cry, poor boy, the Nouvel Obs is here to tell the world the true story of your debacle.

I keep in my archives a gem of an article from the same magazine, published shortly before the first Gulf war over a dozen years ago. It vividly describes—with photos, computer graphics, diagrams, interviews with retired generals—how the Americans, or rather the coalition in which the French were then nominally included, were heading for a fate worse than Vietnam. I’ll never forget that article, or the dozens like it. But your average Nouvel Obs reader, chortling with delight over the current American "disaster" in Iraq, has no idea of his magazine’s track record.

Last year, the journalist Sara Daniel (the daughter, as it happens, of editor-in-chief Jean Daniel) distinguished herself with an article in the Nouvel Obs on Arab honor killings in which she alleged that Israeli soldiers deliberately rape Palestinian girls knowing they will be killed (honorably) by their families. This caused an uproar, finally squelched by some wimpy verbiage about inadvertently dropped quotation marks and other such lies. Today, brave Sara is slogging around in Iraq. She spent a few days with the boys (and girls) of the 101st Airborne and, clever little French journalist that she is, found one willing to gripe into her tape recorder.

You know those amateur theatricals in which two people play ten roles? That’s Sara’s cut-rate journalism. A few quotes from the disgruntled soldier, a few lines about an ambush, a description of the dead and the mangled, and suddenly a whole company of miserable soldiers don’t know what they are doing in Iraq and only want to go home. The hitch is, it’s a company of one. Evidently the morale of the troops was so low that she could find only one soldier to whine for her.

Sara and the Nouvel Obs have access to all kinds of information. If you think al-Jazeera possesses the only doorstep at which mysterious videos are delivered to bring Americans the tidings of their imminent destruction, you might be surprised to learn that someone—who could it be, my goodness?—dropped a video at the feet of Mlle. Daniel. In this clip, courageous Iraqi freedom fighters are shooting a missile at a DHL cargo plane. Might this have something to do, perhaps, with some still photos published recently in Paris-Match? Same scene, but shot in two forms? I don’t know (I’ve been back in the U.S. and couldn’t follow all the threads), but I mean to ask around as soon as I return to Paris.

Already this much is clear. You’ve heard how terrorists invite al-Jazeera and other insiders to "come along and see us attack the Americans." Well, it seems that for this particular photo-op, Paris-Match was included. The way Paris-Match tells it, they received only the first half of the invitation, the "come along" part, when to their utter surprise, after three days of hanging out with the brave resistance—lo and behold!—a missile, a DHL plane, and pictures that no one ever expected to materialize.

As they say in French, il ment comme il respire, he lies as he breathes.

About France in general, her assessment is more to the point:

France is in fact an adversary of the United States—as is its right, after all. But the French honestly believe their country is behaving like a reasonable ally, and there is no way to convince them of the contrary. They are hooked up to an intravenous flow of lies about the United States, fed propaganda disguised as information, molecules of fact dissolved in a carefully regulated solution to keep them on an even keel and save them from having to judge for themselves. No raw data allowed; one mustn’t have people developing a taste for reality.

and

Will the pacifist and pacified French stand up and defend their nation? Or will we have to leave?

That is what it boils down to. Things have gone from shouting "death to the Jews" to firebombing schools and synagogues, to persecution, attacks, even murder. We have Muslim rage in schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. Police headquarters are attacked, hospital personnel beaten, judges threatened. The Republic is under siege, and what are the French doing about it? They are trashing America.

This, it seems, is their new Maginot line: the sneer of hatred. Hand in hand with the government and the intellectual classes, the French media are channeling the national dismay over lost grandeur into contempt for America. Watch these suave Europeans, snickering to themselves because American soldiers are getting killed in Iraq. Is that (they sneer) any way to risk your life? Go on a crusade to fight incurable disease, cross in front of a moving car, smoke a cigarette. But fight to defend your own country? It’s indecent!

I don't know about you, but anyone who snickers about the deaths of American soldiers is neither a friend nor an ally.