Sarkozy’s war

„The French Socialist Party triumphed in local elections last weekend. The Libyan rebels triumphed in Brega and Ras Lanouf. In France, attention turned to the presidential election of 2012. In Libya, the rebels set their sights on Tripoli. You may not think all of these things are connected. But they are.

We Americans have a long tradition of declaring war in the run-up to election campaigns: Hollywood once mocked this habit in Wag the Dog, a movie starring Robert De Niro as a political consultant who covers up a presidential sex scandal and wins an election by launching a fake war in Albania. In this real-life Francophone sequel, there is no sex scandal: The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is unpopular because of government corruption, because the French economy is weaker than it was supposed to be, because he and his now former foreign minister chose the wrong side in Tunisia, and because he’s erratic and unpredictable. Nor is the war a fake: The no-fly zone in Libya is real, as is a bombing campaign designed to aid the Libyan rebels.

No sly consultant lurks in the wings, either. Au contraire: The man who introduced Sarkozy to the Benghazi rebels is none other than Bernard-Henri Levy, a pop philosopher so French that I can’t think of an American equivalent. We just don’t have philosophers who wear their shirts unbuttoned, marry blond actresses and take sides, enthusiastically, in wars in Bangladesh, Angola, Rwanda, Bosnia and beyond. By siding with Levy’s emotional plea for humanitarian intervention — a decision that surprised even his foreign minister — Sarkozy clearly thinks he might share some of the philosopher’s glamour.”