Le Monde of Paris led Thursday
with President Jacques Chirac's warning to Saddam Hussein that time is running
out for Iraq, and beneath this headline ran a front-page cartoon of the angel
of death, statement in hand, approaching a lectern bearing the seal of the
president of the United States. Le Monde also devoted a whole page to an
article titled "The Clinton Haters' Club" about a group of
right-wingers--including Grover Norquist Jr., Arianna Huffington, R. Emmett
Tyrrell Jr., and the British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "one of the
heroes of the Clinton haters"--who met once a week for dinner in a private room
of La Brasserie in Washington, D.C., to "plot" against the president.
Wednesday, Le Monde ,
in its main headline, portrayed France as the leader of the last battle to stop
a war against Iraq and reprinted in French translation Tom Clancy's
anti-bombing New York Times article on its front page. In a front-page
column in the conservative Le Figaro, Charles Lambroschini commended the French government
for inventing the concept of "white glove inspections" as a face-saver for
Saddam and said that, despite the U.S. media's criticism of France, President
Clinton should be pleased about France's independent line, because "he can
longer hide his own doubts about the effectiveness of a bombing campaign."
While
Clinton couldn't be sure of destroying Saddam's "diabolic arsenal,"
Lambroschini said, he could be "virtually certain of unleashing a wave of
anti-American and pro-Islamic feeling in the Middle East." The Irish Times led Thursday
with an interview with Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen, who said
that war "must not be waged" against Iraq and left open the possibility that
China might use its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to oppose a U.S.
attack.
The conservative Daily Telegraph of London
extracted an admission Thursday from the British government that until last
year, it had permitted the export to Iraq of materials used in the production
of anthrax. In an editorial, the Telegraph described U.S. indecision
about whether to grant an entry visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams as
"obscene," said that the questions about Ireland from U.S. legislators of
British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his recent visit to Washington were
"of the kind that ought to be reserved for a Turkish president accounting for
his country's treatment of the Kurds--not for America's closest democratic
ally," and urged the British government to embark on a serious propaganda war
that would defeat "the terrorists ... on the battlefield of ideas, as well as
in the back streets of Belfast." The Irish Independent led on chairman of the Ulster peace
talks and former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who warned of fresh
violence but continued to insist that a peace agreement "can be done and
will be done" by the May 1 deadline.
In an
interview with Corriere della Sera of Milan, U.S. Air Force Gen. Charles Horner,
who commanded the air offensive in the Gulf War, said that if Clinton's aim was
to destroy the sites Iraq had declared off-limits to U.N. inspectors, "we have
failed before even beginning, since nobody knows where they are." Attempting to
kill Saddam would also be "ridiculous," he said, for it would mean bombing
Baghdad and killing thousands of innocent people when "Saddam's skin isn't
worth a single Iraqi, American, or allied life." Asked what advice he would
give Clinton, Horner replied, "Don't send your troops to die and to kill for
something you don't fully understand." La Repubblica of Rome reported Thursday that the pope said
he would go to Baghdad, but not before the year 2000.
On its editorial page, Le Monde
published an analysis of the situation in Iran, holding out little hope of a
real rapprochement between the West and Iran following its reaffirmation of the
fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the death sentence passed recently on a
German for having sexual relations with a Muslim woman. Le Monde
Thursday carried a front-page report that the traffic lights in Bogota,
Colombia, one of the world's most violent and disorderly cities, were now being
switched off during the night to reduce the number of accidents caused by
motorists crashing into them. Most French and Italian newspapers published
multipage eulogies of the German writer Ernst Juenger (a World War I veteran
who celebrated the Prussian military and attacked democracy in his early novels
but went on to oppose Hitler), who died this week at the age of 102. In
Britain, the weekly New Scientist magazine reported that a study showing
that cannabis is safer than alcohol or tobacco had been suppressed by the World
Health Organization under pressure from U.S. drug officials and advisers from
the U.N. Drug Control Program. Le Figaro of Paris reported Thursday that
drinking two or three glasses of wine a day has been proved to cut the risk of
death from cancer by 20 percent among Alsatian men.
On its front page the
Asian Age of India reported that the Indian election campaign had set
new standards of vulgar and abusive language. For example, the Shiv Sena party
leader, Bal Thackeray, told an opponent to "get circumcised" if he had so much
empathy with Muslims, and informed Congress Party leaders that their dependence
on Sonia Gandhi (widow of onetime Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) showed they were
"impotent." Even a former minister of parliamentary affairs, whose job had been
to uphold standards of parliamentary behavior, stated publicly that Sonia
Gandhi's political opponents were "shit scared" of her, the Asian Age
said.
