Dick Morris appeared on the O'Reilly Factor Show on the Fox News Channel.
He recently returned from a trip to Paris where he addressed the French Council on Foreign Relations. He will discuss his speech and why France is behaving as it is.
Here's a partial text of Dick's remarks in which he excoriates France for its "national amnesia" in forgetting the debt it owes us.
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FRANCE: FROM GREAT TO INGRATE
By Dick Morris
(On Friday, March 7, I addressed the French Council on Foreign Relations. Here is a partial text of my remarks)
France is suffering from a collective, national amnesia. You have allied yourselves with a nation that invaded you twice and another that threatened you for half a century against the two countries that saved you.
What are we asking of you? Not your troops, not your children, not your money, not your bases, not even for overflight of your territory. We are asking only for you to get out of the way and let us do our job to help us, help you, and help all of humanity.
You say that inspections are working. Yet you concede that they are only having a limited impact because 200,000 US and British troops are over the border in Kuwait. You say give the inspections more time. How long are we supposed to keep our Army on alert there? Will you pay for it? Will you even contribute to the enormous financial cost? And what of their morale and combat readiness? How long can we keep them there to give your inspectors time?
Is there anybody here who truly believes that if we let Saddam disarm on his own - assuming he would which he won't - and we send our troops home that he will not throw out the inspectors as he did before and that he will again reacquire the arms he says he'll destroy? Do any of you doubt that we would be back here within five years having the same discussion?
You do not realize how shattered the American people were by 9-11. You do not grasp the magnitude of the threat under which we feel we now live. Your national experience has been so much more brutal. You were occupied by the Germans. You lost one-quarter of your young men in World War I. But we have not had a comparable past. To us, the loss of 3,100 men and women and the ongoing threat of random terror attacks has left us with a searing case of national angst.
We look around for the allies who we have helped in their past. We look France who we saved in two wars and protected from the Soviets. We look for Germany where our sentinels stood guard and whose capital city we supplied from the air two years after it was the headquarters of our enemy. But we feel abandoned. We feel deserted. Our diplomats will forget and forgive. Our State Department will move onto new objectives. But our people will not forget your abandonment. It will be at least another generation before you can count on the friendship of the American people. You have alienated us beyond redemption.
And what are you doing to the United Nations? If France vetoes this resolution, or if the states of the Security Council reject it, we will never ask the U.N. for permission again. The Security Council will become as discredited as the General Assembly, the body which designated Iraq in charge of the Human Rights Committee and Libya in charge of disarmament. Who would ever think of asking the General Assembly? In the future who would ever ask the Security Council.
Your vote is only important because of your veto. But, use it here and it will be the last time you ever do because we will never again subject our vital national interests to your caveat.
You ask why the Democrats don't speak up against the war. Because they are not suicidal. Well, maybe they are but not about this. The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans support Bush on Iraq and recognize that we must do what we must do.
You wonder whether there will be patience in the US for a long war or high casualties. If will only be long or deadly if Saddam uses the weapons of mass destruction you maintain he doesn't have. And should he use those weapons against our troops or against Israel, that will become its own motivation for us. We would fight forever to depose the leader who ordered our troops gassed.
President Bush is fighting to ban terrorism from the tools of war, just as poison gas and nuclear weapons were, in effect banned. Hitler didn't even use poison gas on the battlefield. Only Saddam has done that. The Soviets lost in Afghanistan rather than use nuclear weapons. We Americans know that if Bush patiently goes country by country, he will consign the random killing of civilians as an instrument of conflict to a similar fate.
We ask for only one thing and we ask it in the name of those who lie buried at Normandy and in dozens of other French military cemeteries - let us do our job.
