No Blood for Chocolate!

Just for fun, I did a Nexis search for "Ivory Coast" and "quagmire." There were only four stories that made the connection, even though the situation the French occupiers face there after three years of military operations is as squishy and sticky as any good quagmire.

By comparison, "Iraq" and "quagmire" generated 382 hits in major English language dailies in just the last month. (Google generated 250,000 hits!)

The Ivory Coast search yielded a delightfully wicked piece by Lorne Gunter in Canada's National Post. There's no long a link to the story on the site, so here it is in its entirety:

No blood for chocolate! No blood for chocolate! No blood for chocolate!

Where are the mass protests in the streets of the world's capitals against France's military intervention in the Ivory Coast?

This month, French peacekeepers in the former French colony launched a pre-emptive assault against the Ivorian air force. They also interferred with the internal politics of the troubled nation and sought regime change -- or at least they have been accused of both by President Laurent Gbagbo.

They acted without authorization by the United Nations Security Council.

They violated both the UN Charter and the terms of the peacekeeping resolution that established their specific mission in the West African nation.

The Security Council did sanction their attacks after the fact. Nonetheless, the French acted unilaterally, and only sought and received a UN cover story later. There wasn't even a coalition of the willing. No Brits, Aussies, Poles or Dutch to help out; just French troops, jets, helicopters and armoured personnel carriers.

While the French have achieved their military goals quickly and easily, they have failed to stop the destruction of much of the I.C.'s infrastructure.

They have been powerless to end a Muslim insurgency that controls half of Ivory Coast's territory. They have stood by while schools and libraries were torched, failed to prevent widespread looting and have even fired on civilian mobs twice, killing as many as 60 Ivorians. And they have hardly been welcomed as liberators by the locals.

Tens of thousands of Ivorians wielding machetes, clubs and long-handled axes marched through the streets of Abidjan, the financial capital, last week shouting "French go home!" and "Everybody get your Frenchman!" as they ransacked French-owed businesses and residences.

Tens of thousands of immigrant Ivorians have been turned into refugees, fleeing into neighbouring Liberia, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Ghana.

Who knows, perhaps we'll also soon learn that some fabulous national museum containing world heritage treasures -- yet a museum no one in the West, outside of a handful of archaeologists, had heard ever of -- was picked clean thanks to French neglect.

All of this was done in the name of protecting French commercial interests in the IC's lucrative cocoa trade (and timber, mines and oil).

So where are the campus radicals, the smug Western intellectuals and the preening pundits with their accusations of blood for chocolate?

Where is their accusation that the whole thing has just been a giant conspiracy to ensure French President Jacques Chirac's buddies in the chocolate industry have all the cheap cocoa butter they want?

There has been no media talk of quagmire, even though the French have been involved in the I.C.'s civil war for nearly three years. The French military intervention proceeded for the first 17 months without any UN authorization whatever. And the Chirac government has repeatedly escalated its troop commitment from 500 in 2002, to 2,500 in 2003, to 4,000 earlier this year, to 5,000 today. And the situation only worsens.

Where is their outrage at the inability of French forces to secure instantly and perfectly every block of the Ivory Coast's teeming cities? Where are the BBC interviews with Secretary-General Kofi Annan declaring the French adventure "illegal," as he did concerning the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq? Where are the letters from Annan to Chirac entreating him not to quell the insurgency or crush the forces fighting French troops for fear of provoking worse from the locals, the way he cautioned the Americans against pacifying Falluja.

Let me be emphatic: The French have done exactly what they should have in Ivory Coast. They destroyed the five-aircraft Ivorian air force after it had bombed a French base, apparently by mistake, and killed nine soldiers. They fired on an ugly Ivorian throng only after the mob threatened to attack the country's largest airport, which the French had secured so jets could whisk thousands of French nationals to safety.

What's galling is the way the French have done it all without any deference to the multilateral consensus-building they so smugly demanded of the Americans and British last year when the boots were on the other feet.

Doubly galling is the silence -- even complicity -- of the UN and the international community, which last year so sanctimoniously and vocally obstructed the invasion of Iraq.

No other nation has inserted itself militarily into African affairs in the post-colonial period more than France -- nearly two dozen times -- including on behalf of the murderous Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who proclaimed himself emperor of the Central African Republic, and in support of the Hutu government of Rwanda, whose supporters butchered half a million or more Tutsis in 1994.

The truth is, international opposition to the Iraq war (including French opposition) was prompted as much by bitter anti-Americanism and irrational hatred of George W. Bush as it was by any true concern for peace or multilateralism.

Will Michael Moore now rush to Yamoussoukro, the I.C.'s political capital, to produce a "documentary" on the scandal of French unilateralism and neo-colonialism?

Of course not. When it is countries and leaders they favour committing the offences, the international left gives them a free pass.