Sarkozy love-fest

It's official. Roger Cohen is in love with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Describing the French president's critics as if they're universally viewing Sarkozy as a "Bonapartist Caligula, consumed with himself, brooking no dissent, [and] petulant to the point of puerility", Cohen argues that Sarkozy is instead "a tonic to his country and the most important European leader of his time." In a similarly fawning New York Times column last August, Cohen described Sarkozy as "a French president who seems determined to make his office more accountable, more accessible, more open, and invoking American-style checks and balances to achieve that."

I am not surprised by these public declarations of love for the French President. Cohen, an IHT columnist based in Paris, is a "liberal hawk." As Michael Tomasky outlined in the Guardian last year, others are Newyorker editor David Remnick, Newyorker writer George Packer, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, and Vanity Fair contributor Christopher Hitchens. Each of these public intellectuals has in common that they wholeheartedly supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Most of them later argued that although the decision to remove Saddam Hussein without broad international support remained correct -- and that they were not responsible for the resulting carnage because of their "good intentions" -- they had been wrong to support regime change in Iraq because no one could have foreseen that the Bush Administration would be so inept in the execution of this war of aggression.

After having been proven wrong by the critics of the Iraq invasion who expressed caution and demanded careful scrutiny of claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before going to war -- notably including the previous French administration -- it must be nice for Cohen to turn the page and focus on a President who cannot deal with criticism, and who is impatiently trying to implement grand ideas without being able to deliver. You know, the kind we have in the White House now.