We in America seem to, as a culture, have our own little quirks. I'm going to speak in the broadest of generalities so bear with me...

• We often believe our own propaganda about the world and events outside our borders. How could we do anything else when our MSM tells us nothing else and we're too lazy to investigate on our own?
• We believe unflinchingly in the might of the American military. There's nothing it can't do. A fact which may be true when it comes to turning any square mile, or country, on the planet into glowing glass if we feel like it... but it's a completely different matter when the goal is making friends and building nations. As the old saying goes, "The military's good at two things: killin' people and breakin' stuff".
• And lastly, but often causing the most trouble, we're always right. Just ask us; we know what's best for the world. Why are we always right? Because we say we are. (Do I really need to point out the flaws in that logic?)

Which makes it ironic that we would choose to deride the French as pessimistic pansies when they've proven right so often. I never really thought about it that way until tonight while reading Donklephant. Here's a bit by Donklephant cross-poster sideways (whose own blog, Sideways Mencken, should be one of your daily reads as well):

They said, “disaster,” we said, “cakewalk.” Then, inexplicably, we acted as though we believed our own propaganda. We treated Iraq like a cakewalk and we got a disaster. The French were right. We were wrong.
...

But it occurs to me that we might in the future want to listen a little more carefully to the French. We have in this country a parodic view of the French as military failures. This is derived almost entirely from the well-known collapse of French forces before the Nazis. But that attitude — always simplistic given Bonaparte and the tenacious French performance in World War I — is a relic of a bygone era. We have our own military failures now. In Korea we fought to a draw. In Vietnam we lost. In Gulf War I we started well and booted the follow-through. In Afghanistan we are losing. In Iraq we are losing.

It’s not 1945 anymore, and we’re more French than we like to admit.

Go read the whole thing; it'll make you think.

Labels: political

This entry was posted by Damien, on Wednesday, September 27, 2006. You can leave your response.