--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How likely is it that the French deliberately set > Bush ? > > Dan M.
Ah, now _there_ you have the billion dollar question. I'm suspicious enough of the French to say it's possible, but I don't think it's likely. I frankly don't think that the French government is competent enough to go through the chain of logic that it would require - i.e. The Americans _are_ going to invade, we can't stop them, therefore we can supply false intelligence, which they will probably use, which we can embarass them with later. French policy seems, to me, to be more easily ascribed to a combination of malice and incompetence than the sort of Machiavellian genius that would require. They haven't shown any signs of that since Austerlitz, so it seems unlikely it would pop up in 2002 all of a sudden. They would also be taking a terrible risk - the total collapse of intelligence cooperation between the US/Britain/their allies and France. That's not something that anyone wants, not even de Villepin. But it's certainly _possible_. It would be consistent with the simplest possible explanation of French motivations (i.e. that the driving force of French foreign policy is the weakening of the United States). It just seems, to me, unlikely that they were thinking that far ahead. Definitely something worth thinking about. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
