Bernard Kouchner, Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm & Neil Clark
In today's Observer, Nick Cohen turns away from moaning about the plight of the 'less fortunate' couples on £100,000 a year and turns to Bernard Kouchner, the new French foreign minister. And promptly gets a lesson in the facts from Conor Foley (also - did Jacques Chirac really support Iran's efforts to get a nuclear bomb?).Oliver Kamm criticised Neil Clark over Kouchner earlier this week, with the latter claiming he was in favour of the Iraq war and the former saying that he wasn't. I think Oliver is probably [1] right in that the exact words Neil used were wrong, as he talked of Kouchner's 'welcoming' the Iraq war, ie before it happened, and that is not correct. However the wider story is it's certainly true that Kouchner was in favour of the war after it had happened, as he told Robert Graham of the Financial Times in early 2004 - "it was right to intervene". The FT link isn't working, but here's one from Norman Geras's blog.
[1] I've edited this to add 'probably' as there were certainly people -- one being of the calibre of John Lloyd in this whine - who at the time thought Kouchner was in favour of a war.
Update: Matthew 'unquestionably the 2nd most powerful country in the world' Jamieson says that Kouchner was the most senior French politician 'to support the Iraq war' - I think that's game over for Neil Clark.
Labels: Decent Left, France, Iraq
posted by Matthew @ 5/27/2007 06:27:00 PM
Comments: 7
