FRANCE

KEITH RICHBURG, Washington Post Foreign Correspondent, May 6, 2002
CZIKOWSKY: Has news about the Le Pen candidacy been overblown? Had there been a different configuration of election returns, especially if the left wing had not been as divided and perhaps had run better campaigns, this would not have been such a large news item. Or, am I incorrect, and there has been a serious growth in the right wing in French politics?
RICHBURG: You are right that the divided French left allowed Le Pen to steal second place. But the threat was serious enough considering only two candidates make it to the runoff. There was never a doubt Chirac would win, but the French wanted a massive turnout to show the world that they reject what Le Pen stood for. To most French, even letting Le Pen get 30 percent would have been a global embarrassment.

JAMIN RASKIN, Visiting Professmor Institut d’Etudes Politiques, December 18, 2003
CZIKOWSKY: Attempts to ban religious symbols have failed throughout history. Africans brought to America, whose religions were banned, secretly incorporated the ir banned religious deities into Christian images. Eastern Europeans chose bake goods and other secret symbols to represent religious symbols banned by Communism. Does France believe that banning religious symbols will quiet religious divisions when history shows us that banning them tends to only stimulate resistance to the bans?
RASKIN: Fair point. But remember that France clings dearly to the Enlightenment and, by the way, to a number of our Revolutionary heroes, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, who were considered atheists and heathen in their time. Everything in French life revolves around rationality and proving things correct through empiricism, science, and logic. This is a deeply admirable impulse, I think, especially in a world with so much religious fanaticism and hatred. But this policy, as you are properly suggesting, may just be driving something underground that needs to be expressed. Those Moslem girls should be in French schools learning math and science and history and the values of La Republique.

DANA PRIEST, Washington Post Staff Writer, July 7, 2005
CZIKOWSKY: It is certainly ironic that, after all the negative comments that Secretary Rumsfeld has said about the French government, that it is the French Alliance Base that is in fact one of our best collaborators in intelligence. Has Rumsfeld finally agreed that working with the French has its benefits, and that the French may at least participate in Red Flag exercises and that American and French military personnel may resume greater communications?
PRIEST: Not that I know of.

DAVID MILIBAND, United Kingdom Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, September 27, 2007
CZIKOWSKY: How do you view the changes in the French government and their revised foreign policies?
MILIBAND: President Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Kouchner have brought a new dynamic to French relations with Britain and the rest of the world. Their commitment to closer working inside NATO, for example, and their readiness to support economic and political reconstruction in Iraq, is welcome.