Very Smart Arguments

Long, long ago, the left loved to decry our “unilateralism”. I was instructed by approximately 1.5 zillion Very Smart Lefties that our unilateralism was preventing “our allies” from helping us do things, such as fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(“Our allies”, according to this Very Smart Argument, denoted a handful of Western European countries (mostly France and Germany) who don’t like us and don’t want to help us do things. Those are “our allies”, according to Very Smart Lefties: countries who don’t like what we’re doing and don’t want to help us.)

Anyway, the argument continued, the fact that “our allies” weren’t helping us do things they didn’t want to be done was a problem that needed solving. The cause of this problem was that our government (having been led by President Bush) wasn’t left-wing enough. The solution was that our government needed to be more left-wing. In particular, it needed to have a guy with a (D) after his name in charge rather than an (R). And that man was John Kerry. If we just elected John Kerry, you see, then “our allies” would suddenly want to help us accomplish things that they didn’t want to accomplish. Purely because of the (D) after the guy’s name. This was actually 80% of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign pitch: that because of who he was, he would “get” “our allies” to help us to bring about all these things they didn’t want to occur (and which Kerry didn’t want to actually do anyway).

Well, inexplicably, that brilliant argument didn’t work out so well for Kerry, but four years later, we did elect a (D) and (I assume) this must mean that “our allies” now suddenly really want to help us do these things that they don’t want to happen. Okay, yeah, how’s that working out for us then?

Yeah, not so well:

France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan and wants instead to see an enlarged Afghan army, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a newspaper interview released on Thursday.

The United States is considering sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and has urged its NATO allies to bolster their forces to tackle the Taliban.

Britain announced this week that it was ready to send 500 more troops but Sarkozy told Le Figaro daily that he was sticking to a long-standing pledge not to send more forces.

“Is it necessary to stay in Afghanistan? I say ‘yes’. And to stay to win. If we leave, Pakistan, a nuclear power, will be threatened. But France will not send one more soldier,” Sarkozy said.

How strange. Didn’t anyone tell Sarkozy that we have a President with a (D) after his name, and who is nice and multilateral, and so (therefore) France should suddenly want to send thousands and thousands of their young men to die in our wars that they didn’t want to see fought in the first place? That, after all, was the Very Smart Lefty Argument put forth by Very Smarty Lefties (like, even, professors and such!). So you know it was correct. Someone needs to tell Sarkozy.

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