But this whole “freedom fries” thing is outta control.

Personally, I don't need Jacques Chirac's resistance to the war option to back up my position on war. France is complicit in the current situation; the compromises hammered out in the UN security council after the first Gulf War created the crisis we have now, just as the Armistice after WWI created the situation that led to WWII. Thousands of people in Iraq–many of them children–have died as a result of sanctions that have not prevented Saddam from rebuilding his military or enriching himself.

But I don't think that another war with Iraq is going to solve the problem. And I don't think that blaming the French for blocking the UN from giving the US carte blanche (pardon my French) for warmaking is anything but standard anti-European stupidity.

Here's why the French piss me off. First of all, as I mentioned above , they are complicit in the creation of this crisis. I'm pissed at them for proliferating nuclear technology in the '70s, and s for being hypocrites about unilateral intervention (ask anybody in Chad, or Sudan, or any other number of former French colonies about that) and weapons of mass destruction (ask any Stromium-90 breathing denizen of the South Pacific about that).

But the big pisser-offer is France's agenda for blocking a UN resolution: France just plain resents the US being the “ultrapower”, and has designs on a reunited Napoleonic Empire (er, the EU) being the dominant superpower in the world with a single common foreign policy and a united defense infrastructure (which, preferably, doesn't include the US).

There's plenty of reason for people everywhere to resent the US — our culture is a virus, and it overwhelms the culture of Europe. We have a bigger market for American English-based entertainment than the French have for their films, so American media dominates. American corporations have commoditized everything from fast food to fashion, and have iconized commodities. The French have…Vivendi Universal? They just lost 25 billion Euros, and are looking to cash out of their main assets–which are American entertainment assets.

More reasons to resent the US: George Bush is decidedly non-Euro-friendly. He doesn't parlez-vou, if you know what I mean. He thinks travelling abroad means riding on Laura's back. He's being steered by neo-conservative America-firsters who think American military hegemony is the answer to world security. He uses the “I've got a gun and I'm not afraid to use it” approach to diplomacy that made Texas #1 in lethal injections. The French (and many other people) look at him and say “Cowboy”–and they don't mean the Marlboro Man who led so many of them to fashionable bouts with emphasyma ( they're fourth, behind Australia, Denmark and Canada in male mortality due to unfiltered smokes).

But France's anti-Americanism goes back to DeGaulle, who returned to power in France in 1958 as the result of a threatened coup by the French military in Algeria (there's a reason we use the French coup d'etat to describe a sudden overthrow of a government). Many of the French ruling class, like many Americans, see their country as the center of the universe; they are much more cultured, cosmopolitan, and they have that certain…