February 17, 2003	Monday	Zul Hijjah 15, 1423

LONDON: The ill-tempered insults that have characterized the war-peace debate in the past few weeks began in earnest with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s sneer at ‘old Europe’, a remark which angered the French and Germans.

Roselyne Bachelot, the French Environment Minister, said Rumsfeld was talking ‘Cambronne’s word’. Cambronne was a French general who, when fatally wounded at Waterloo, said simply, ‘Merde’. Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, said Rumsfeld should ‘cool’ down.

With calculated insouciance, Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s spokesman, said France and Germany had the “prerogative, if they choose, to be on the sideline”, making clear that US forces would go ahead in any event.

“The game is over,” President Bush told Iraq on Thursday. “It’s not a game, and it’s not over,” Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French Prime Minister, shot back on Saturday.

Hostile television networks and editorial writers are competing to come up with the wittiest anti-Franco bile. Phrases coined include ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and ‘axis of weasel’ for the French-German alliance. The co-host of CNN’s Crossfire programme declared to audience cheers on Thursday night: ‘Let’s beat up the French.’

British journalist Christopher Hitchens, in the Wall Street Journal, said Chirac was “a monster of conceit... a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.”

France shrugs off what the left-wing daily Liberation labelled ‘le frog-bashing’ as a manifestation of primitive prejudices. “It’s a little tiresome,” a French diplomat said. “Americans always throw tantrums like this when they don’t get their way.”

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post showed US war graves in Normandy with the headline: “They died for France but France has forgotten”. A cartoon showed an ostrich with its head in the sand below the words: “The national bird of France.” The Washington Post opined that France’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was ‘oily’ .

When France Inter radio’s correspondent in Washington, Laurence Simon, started to explain her government’s position to Fox News she was interrupted by the presenter. “With friends like you, who needs enemies,” she was told as she was taken off air.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.