The wingnuts are not just content to watch happily as France becomes Baghdad sur Seine (you know, the place from which good news are not reported…), they HAD to bring France into Plamegate.
And it’s brilliant in its simplicity: Wilson is a French agent provocateur, manipulated thanks to his oversized ego…
This is the theory published by the grandly named American Thinker, and promptly circulated by the right wing blogosphere:
Joseph A. Wilson IV: The French Connection
There are an amazing number of French fingerprints all over the Plame-Wilson affair. While it is not easy to penetrate the dark fog of lies, there is a highly consistent pattern pointing to French government involvement with a Watergate-style assault on the American Presidency, fronted by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
I wonder what a Watergate-style assault on the American Presidency is, given how that was an assault by the American Presidency on political opponents… But maybe it means that France is being Nixon in this story?
In 2002 French intelligence forged the notorious document claiming that Saddam tried to obtain Niger uranium. The Italian middle man, Rocco Martino, later confessed to French involvement in open court. Rocco Martino might sound like a small-time mafia hood from the Sopranos. Actually, he works at times for Italian military intelligence. The truth about the French connection came out when Martino confessed in court that the French had given him the forged document to peddle to various intelligence agencies. The Italians and French have had a furious war of words ever since then about who was responsible for the forgery.
The only source I have found on this is this article in the Telegraph (a virulently anti-French British paper), which, despite its catchy title, only points that Martino (i) is involved in the forgery, and (ii) also worked for the French (but nothing specific is said about the Frenhc working on these documents with him, despite strong innuendo).
Fair enough: muddy enough these already dark waters, and maybe enough doubt will be sown.
The FBI just leaked a claim that Rocco did it just for the money. That is very doubtful. The French naturally deny any responsibility, but the forged document was dropped on the public at exactly the time that Dominique de Villepin, then Foreign Minister, was in New York trying to make Colin Powell believe that France was prepared to help overthrow Saddam. The French forgery was a stink bomb, designed to be exposed in public as soon as Colin Powell publicly accepted it.
(…)
It was a carefully planned ambush. Timmerman summed it up by saying that
“Chirac lied to the president of the United States, and then he ordered his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to do the same thing with Colin Powell.”
And then, they pulled the plug.
De Villepin’s ambush triggered a giant anti-American firestorm in Europe and around the world. Germans, French, Brits and Swedes were foaming at the mouth for months and months. France was therefore extremely successful in discrediting American policy against Saddam.
The Brits? You mean these people actually care about public opinion, as opposed to what the actual policy of the government was?
And how could the great American fight for freedom be discredited by those corrupt French?
But that was not enough, because Saddam was quickly knocked over by the US-led coalition forces. Somehow the media fires had to be kept alive. The “Bush lied us into war” slogan had to be kept going in the minds of the public.
Enter our hero, Joseph C. Wilson, from stage left. The French forgery about Niger led straight to Wilson’s bogus trip to Africa. Wilson supposedly went there to find out the truth for the CIA. But every government involved already knew the truth about the bogus document, because it showed incorrect names of Niger officials. A single telephone call to Niger would have established that fact.
“Bush lied us into war” slogan had to be kept going in the minds of the public. That’s an interesting way to rewrite history, don’t you think? Now that it is an established fact, long after the war and way too late, it’s easy to claim that this was said back then.
And do I also detect an attempt to brush over the fact that this “obvious forgery” was nevertheless vetted by everybody in the Bush administration and used in the SotU?
But it gets better:
The reason why Wilson had to travel to Niger in person to “investigate,” while drinking mint tea with his uranium mining friends, was to establish his bona fides – to make him an instant “expert witness” on Saddam’s dealings with Niger. Did French intelligence urge Wilson to make his trip and enlist his wife Valerie to propose him?
So it’s not just ambassador wilson who’s a French agent, but also his wife! Quick, what are the CIA and the FBI doing?
Notice that the modus operandi for the Wilson trip was much the same as for the Niger forgery: a classic con game. Find a sucker, tell him what he wants to hear, and use that credulous embrance by the mark to destroy your enemy. In the first case the sucker was Colin Powell. In the second case it was the New York Times Op-Ed page. In both cases the enemy to be shafted was George W. Bush and the administration. This is how disinformation is supposed to work.
Yep, the world is full of evil plots.
Joseph Wilson had intimate French connections for many years before his mint tea-sipping journey to Niger. In fact, he met his first wife at the French Embassy in Washington. His second wife, Jacqueline, to whom he was still married when he took up with Valerie Plame, was a former French diplomat. There is even a report that she was a “cultural attaché” in Francophone Africa, a post often used as cover for intelligence operatives, though this remains quite a murky point, as tradecraft suggests it should.
Oh, Wilson cheated on his wife, and – gasp – another of his wifes was also probably a French spy. Quick, give him the Légion d’Honneur.
Well, hypothetically just suppose for a moment that Wilson’s strings are being pulled by the French. What motivates the French government? They have been very clear about that.
Jacques Chirac and his close ally Dominique de Villepin have long proclaimed France to be the strategic enemy of American power. Paris openly yearns to lead the European Union to superpower status, in order to undermine American “hegemony,” and above all for the eternal grandeur of la belle France. (…) France’s short-term aim for the Niger forgery was to block US actions against Saddam Hussein, or at least to discredit America in the run-up to the Iraq war. The long-term strategic purpose was to drive a wedge between the US and Europe, so that the European Union – guided by France – could be persuaded to revolt against fifty years of US leadership of the West.
This strategy succeeded, but not completely. The American action in Iraq provoked massive public fury in Europe, whipped up by the government-owned media and the Left. It caused a rift in public opinion that continues today. Had Tony Blair not gone along with President Bush against Saddam, the EU might now be going on its separate way, aiming for world domination, just as de Villepin has fervently advocated. If the EU Constitution had been approved, as the media confidently predicted it would be, Jacques Chirac might now be running to be the first president of Europe.
So the citizens of France, thankfully, are not interested in the grandeur de la belle France, and helped to kill the plans for EU “world domination”. Hey, I know, they must be agent provocateurs for the US government. Think about it, it’s obvious!
For decades France has conducted major industrial espionage in the United States. Having Wilson as a source on Clinton’s National Security Council would be an obvious boon for that purpose. Had John Kerry won the 2004 election, Wilson might now be back in the White House, perhaps helping his good friends abroad. He was therefore a very good prospect for French intelligence to cultivate, especially given the lax security standards of the Clinton years. And if Wilson and Plame do succeed in bringing down George W. Bush, Chirac and de Villepin would be overjoyed.
I’m sorry, I can’t help quoting lots of pieces form that article. Now we have Wilson, Clinton and Kerry as French agents. Seriously, US counter-espionage sucks!
French hatred of American power is the reason why France pressured Turkey (anxious to enter the EU) to block the US IV Infantry Division from crossing Iraq’s northern border to help knock over Saddam Hussein. Had the IV ID hit Saddam from the North while Tommy Franks attacked from the South, the current Iraqi insurrection might have been crushed even before it got started, the Baathist hardcore unable to flee north to the Sunni Triangle and entrench itself among the small percentage of Iraqis who benefited from Saddam’s rule. The original plan envisioned just such a pincer movement. We therefore owe many of our 2,000 soldiers’ deaths to deliberate and malicious French sabotage, with thanks to Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac.
Our tentacles reach everywhere. We killed the 2,000 US soliders. (you gotta love that quote, by the way: “entrench itself among the small percentage of Iraqis” – the enemy is a minority, supported by a minority, but that makes them strogn enough to fight the US Army). We have more power over close US allies than even the US. Why do we even need the EU to aim for world domination?
There is every reason to believe that France desperately wants this White House to be weakened or overthrown. They would be happy with Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat as president, because the Euro-socialist, non-interventionist base of that party is compatible with French policies and strategies.
Fair enough. Hillary is a traitor too. But why would we want the Bush administration overthrown? We play them so easily in our quest for world domination that it would probably be a bad idea to put anyone less clueless in place, dontcha think?!
A strong America wielding its mighty military force is de Villepin’s worst nightmare.
Well, it’s mostly a nightmare for Iraqis, and for its very own soldiers, all dying pointlessly in a war of choice.
Maybe the Iraq War is actually a French plot to weaken the USa further? Maybe Chalabi, the architect of that strategy, is really a French agent? So many possibilities, the mind reels…
