By Alexander Chancellor
Saturday April 5, 2003
The Guardian
I have rather unpleasant memories of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the anarchist
leader of the 1968 student revolt in Paris. As "Danny The Red",
a sociology student at the University of Nanterre, he became world famous
for his part in the May uprising that came close to toppling President
Charles de Gaulle.
Mr Cohn-Bendit was 23 years old at the time, and I was 28, just appointed
to serve in Rome as the Italian bureau chief of Reuters News Agency. On
my way to Italy to begin my new job, I stopped for a night in Paris,
where I got tear-gassed in the Boulevard St Michel and felt quite ill for
a week as a result of Danny The Red's troublemaking. Then, about a year
later, he suddenly appeared at the Reuters office in Rome. There was a
story he wanted us to carry on the Reuters news service (I can't remember
what it was about, only that it redounded to his own greater glory). And
to encourage us to do as he wanted (which we didn't), he arrived at the
office with two arrogant young henchmen, also veterans of the Paris
street-fighting.
Nevertheless, with the courtesy I considered due to an international
celebrity, I invited him into my little private office overlooking the
Piazza di Spagna to discuss his proposal. This involved him walking
through the main editorial room, in which he individually urged each
member of staff to resist exploitation. Since it was four o'clock in the
afternoon, I asked Mr Cohn-Bendit and his companions if they would like a
cup of tea - an offer received with merciless Gallic derision. The three
of them then took over my desk and made a succession of telephone calls
to Paris while I stood helplessly by, feeling pathetically English and
middle class. When eventually they left without a word of thanks, I felt
a strong hope that I would never set eyes on any of them again.
But now, 35 years later, I suddenly find myself becoming rather a fan of
Mr Cohn-Bendit. Since 1999, he has been a member of the European
Parliament as leader of the French Greens. And as a passionate European
federalist and eloquent opponent of the war in Iraq, he was recently
invited to debate the war in Washington with one of America's chief
hawks, Richard Perle, who until his resignation last week was top adviser
to the Pentagon on defence policy.
Actually, he is still a leading adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, the defence
secretary, but has resigned as chairman of the defence policy board
because of foreign business ties that appeared to depend, to some extent,
upon his influence with the US defence department. He remains, however,
one of the chief advocates of the new American doctrine of attacking
other countries before they attack you.
In the debate, Mr Cohn-Bendit caught my attention by accusing the US of
"revolutionary hubris", which is exactly what I thought he was
guilty of when he visited my office in Rome all those years ago. As a
self-proclaimed revolutionary himself, he sees the Bush administration as
cast in the same mould. "Recently, your government has been behaving
like the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution," he told Mr Perle.
"You want to change the whole world. Like them, you claim that
history will show that truth is on your side.
"Like every revolutionary, you have good ideas, but your problem
lies in the means you want to use to realise them... Suddenly, you want
to bring democracy to the world," Mr Cohn-Bendit went on.
"After the war, you will neglect Iraq and shift your attention to
Syria, then Saudi Arabia. Because you are Americans, you have the biggest
army in the world: you can do anything you want. This is revolutionary
hubris."
Perle did his best to refute these claims. America was not an aggressive,
imperialist power, he said. Baghdad would be liberated, not by a US
general, but by the Iraqi opposition leader, Ahmed Chalabi. "We will
leave both governance and oil in their hands," he continued.
"We will hand over power quickly to give Iraqis a chance to shape
their own destiny. The whole world will see this. And I expect the Iraqis
to be at least as thankful as French president Jacques Chirac was for
France's liberation."
"Oh, come on! It's not true," retorted Mr Cohn-Bendit. He does
not believe that America will be content to leave the Iraqis to their own
devices. Nor does he believe that America will be willing, in future, to
deal with Europe as an equal partner.
On both points, I suspect that he is right.
www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,928911,00.html
