For Klein, Saddam Hussein and the fanatical Muslim terrorists who target Americans, Jews, and other representatives of the decadent West, are forces of evil who can only be confronted with force. The words of Osama bin Laden, the most well-known of the Muslim fanatics, are those of a man who cannot be reasoned with: 

As Klein writes,

Like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein was a fanatic who responded only to force.  A multitude of resolutions from the United Nations were treated with contempt; negotiations with Saddam were doomed to failure from the outset.  For various reasons, however, both American liberals and the French favored continued negotiations with Saddam, convinced that an agreement could be reached and war avoided.

For Klein, France is like an aged Hollywood actress who cannot accept that time has passed her by.  France clings fiercely to its seat on the United Nations Security Council, convinced that it remains a major player in international relations. After all, France's only chance to contain American power is to act through the United Nations; after France and Russia proved uncooperative, the US simply ignored the UN and launched its invasion of Iraq.  The French looked on helplessly (fecklessly, as Klein would say).

And what did the French think of this?  According to one Le Monde poll, twenty-five percent of the French wanted Iraq to win, just slightly less than the number who preferred a US victory.  A bestselling book in France, Horrifying Fraud, speculated that September 11th was actually a special project of the Pentagon, designed to justify an increase in the military budget.

Klein also attributes France's opposition to the invasion of Iraq to economic self-interest.  Jacques Chirac had worked to end the UN sanctions on Iraq as early as 1996, and by 2001, France was Iraq's largest European trading partner.  The French oil company Total Fina Elf had negotiated the rights to develop the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq, estimated to contain almost twenty-six billion barrels of oil.  

The second Gulf War was a major setback for the United Nations and its proponents, but it was an even more significant defeat for French interets.  The European countries that joined the Coalition of the Willing -- Spain, Italy, Britain, Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine -- all rejected France's leadership role, siding with American interests and making their own determinations as to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's bloody regime.  

The other target of Klein's ire is American liberals.  For Klein, liberals tend to avoid labeling or judging anything as "evil;" by doing so, they avoid the need to act to confront that evil:

If Saddam Hussein wasn't evil, and if he wasn't stockpiling or attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, then he wasn't a threat to the United States or Middle East stability.  In fact, some extremists have gone as far as to say life under Saddam Hussein wasn't all that bad -- witness Michael Moore's portrayal of Iraqi schoolchildren playing in the streets in Fahrenheit 911.

Klein assembles quotes from Al Franken and Michael Moore, but the quotes from neaveau leftiste Al Gore are particularly amusing:

Klein has done a decent job in assembling evidence that the French were influenced by economic self-interest in opposing the US invasion of Iraq.  But elsewhere in the book, Klein concedes that the French were correct in concluding there were no weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the United States or to Europe.  So if French intelligence was better than US intelligence on WMD's, does it really matter that they were also motivated by their interest in Iraqi oil?

In the section on American liberal opposition to the war, Klein relies much too heavily on quotations from Michael Moore and Al Franken, leftist entertainers who play fast and loose with the facts. Klein should have relied on reasoned objections to the US invasion, which could be found in the New York Times, The Nation, or any number of publications.  While the liberal position on the post-war situation in Iraq is confusing and inconsistent, the initial case against war was based in large part on sober analysis of the available intelligence regarding WMD's, not Michael Moore's lunatic ravings about George W. Bush's connections to Big Oil and the House of Saud.

In his book Klein manages to go quite a way toward connecting some of the dots in the war on terror.  It is clear we need to go even further.

The Foolish, the Feckless, and the Fanatic is available on Amazon.com.

Andrew Alexander is Co-Editor of IntellectualConservative.

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