Also this issue: Speak Up -Howard Altman The Bill of Wrongs Patriot II is another Bush assault on the Constitution. -Brian White Letters to the Editor

February 27-March 5, 2003

loose canon

The Other Tyrant

by Bruce Schimmel

PARIS -- The French may be the current butt of American jokes, but commentators in the French press are returning the favor with more pity than contempt.

In dailies and weeklies, the American people are being portrayed more as victims than aggressors. Americans are the pawns of a tyrant whose actions not only deeply injure his own people, but threaten the entire world.

And the tyrant they're referring to is President George W. Bush.

Take the lead editorial in the influential weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur. "Ils la feront tout de même," says the headline. "They're going to do it no matter what."

"They," it is clear, refers not to the American people but to "George Bush and le clan qui l'entoure" -- Bush and his crowd.

"An entire continent is to be rebuilt with bombs!" continues Jean Daniel, editor of the popular and rather mainstream weekly. "Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar," he writes, "were more modest than George W. Bush."

Now, to be sure, in the competition as to who is most vile, President Bush is hardly in the same league as Saddam Hussein. From Le Figaro to Le Monde to the International Herald Tribune, editorial writers make it clear that Hussein must be stopped, his evil defeated.

But though the black hat has been firmly fixed onto Saddam's head, Bush's attempts to gain the moral high ground are viewed skeptically at best. There is nothing but derision for Bush's stark vision of the global political landscape, which to many has all the sophistication -- though none of the humor -- of a spaghetti Western.

The cowboy from Texas and his "equipe" (literally "team") are portrayed as holding the American people hostage inside a narrow moral world of good versus evil, whose only means of resolution will always be war.

"Yes, it is a terrible error," writes Jacques Julliard in the Observateur, "for a country imbued with religious values to believe only in the god of the military."

Strong stuff, and couched in a high moral language you won't find in mainstream American publications. American commentators will attack Bush's logic on intellectual grounds, but the president is given a pass on his moral principles, in part because, however simple, his beliefs seem sincere.

The French press, in contrast, see the president's fundamentalist religious leanings more critically, saying that it is not leadership but tyranny when a nation is bent to a single individual's will.

"Ten Million Marching for Peace, from Sydney to New York," reads the kicker for the main story in Le Nouvel Observateur.

To which the headline answers: "Bush: It Doesn't Matter What the People Want."

As they put it: "Tant Pis Pour Les Peuples." Indeed, so much the worse for us all.