The Cowboys vs the Cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys

If you follow that sport, the NY Times reviews The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism" by Philippe Roger. Conclusion: the French have disliked us for two and a half centuries. I guess that takes Dubya off the hook to a certain extent.

Mr. Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, almost single-handedly creates a new field of study, tracing the nuances and imagery of anti-Americanism in France over 250 years. He shows that far from being a specific reaction to recent American policies, it has been knit into the very substance of French intellectual and cultural life...

In 1768, the naturalist Cornelius De Pauw called America a "vast and sterile desert" whose climate nurtured "astonishingly idiotic" men...

Scorn of America became a literary trope. In Balzac's novels, Mr. Roger points out, it is the "good-for-nothings" who go to America...

By the end of the 19th century...One writer referred to Uncle Sam as "Oncle Shylock," resonantly adding anti-Semitism into the mix. In the 20th century, French politicians blamed the United States for joining the First World War too late, then for insisting that France repay its debts.

Intellectuals like Sartre credited the Soviet Union with winning the Second World War and said that England and the United States invaded just to get in on the victory.

Well, that jibes with my impression of Sartre: he never met an authoritarian government he couldn't support. Of course he credited the Soviets: he was a leftie of the European variety, and that is way way way off to the left.

As for the US joining WWI too late, as I recall, Winston Churchill during the 1930s was sorry that we had joined at all. His reasoning: If the French and British hadn't expected the Americans to arrive shortly, they would have negotiated an end to the war a year earlier. Our entry allowed them to demand unconditional surrender by Germany. Shortening the war by a year would have saved over a million peoples' lives, and a negotiated end of the war would have been unlikely to include the crushing reparations payments from Germany which set the foundation for the explosive inflation of the German currency during 1921-22. Those payments both devastated the economy and gave Hitler his opportunity for seizing control.

In other words, if we had stayed out, Hitler might have remained a third-rate artist and the Second World War would never have happened. At least if Winston Churchill was correct. Churchill likely saw hindsight as a lot easier than foresight tho.

UPDATE: There is a book out on the issue of Woodrow Wilson screwing up the world for the next 70 years by taking us into WWI: Click here: Amazon.com: Books: Wilson's War : How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World WarII Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.