France Is Being France

...or, once a weasel, always a weasel:

During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo.

At the outset of a three-day visit to [Red] China, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he supported Beijing's "anti-secession" law on Taiwan, and vowed to keep pushing for an end to an EU arms embargo that could open the door for Paris to sell weapons to the Asian giant.

Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush is under the impression that this indicates the French have changed their minds about the Doctrine of Pre-emption.

That's a cutsie projection in a puerile "gotcha!" sort of way. But only if you believe that Black Jacques Chirac holds to any core principle besides "Regardez dehors pour le numéro un".

France wants us neutralized as a global hegemon, but they have neither the capability nor the inclination to do it themselves. So they want to sell arms to Red China, which does have both the capability and the ambition, as well as a governing ideology that by definition seeks world domination, with the hope that the ChiComms will make trouble for us at minimum, and, ideally, defeat us altogether.

Kind of like the international version of the Democrat Party.

That's why we've "deputized" Japan, and are further arming Taiwan.

Move, counter-move.

At the moment, I think ours carries the greater weight - at least as far as France is concerned.

As to the ChiComms, that remains to be seen.

UPDATE: If you have a Francophobia itch on Paris' "Munich in the Orient," Right Wing Nuthouse will scratch it down to the dermis.