I would like the English better if they did not remind me of a dry French cheese
without the cheese, but with all of the discomfort.
As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
From the memoirs of General Vernon Walters and the reality of President Charles De Gaulle in knowing what Americans in power are in their failings of self preservation.
I remembered that in 1959 I had gone with General Lauris Norstad, the NATO Supreme Commander, who was trying to get General de Gaulle to put the French fighter defense under the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. General Norstad ex¬ plained that the real air defense of Western Europe would notso much be in the air battles over Western Europe but what we did to the Soviet Air Force on its bases. General de Gaulle then asked, “How would you find them?” And General Norstad in¬ dicated to me that I should show General de Gaulle the U-2 photograph of a Soviet Air Force base deep inside the Soviet Union. De Gaulle, who could not see very well, examined the large photograph very carefully and then said, “C’est bien, c’est tres bien” (It is good, it is very good). I expected him to ask how we took the picture, but he did not. He asked General Nor¬ stad with what kind of weapon and with what yield one should attack a target like this. General Norstad told him specifically. He thanked us both courteously, but he did not put French Air Defense under NATO.
When in 1962 President Kennedy had sent Dean Acheson and Sherman Kent to see General de Gaulle to show him the photographs of the Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, Gen¬ eral de Gaulle, unlike many of the European leaders, had ac¬ cepted that it might be necessary for the United States to take pre-emptive military action against Cuba. He was a man who understood the uses of power and he watched carefully to see what we would do. When he saw that instead of taking such ac¬ tion we appeared to have made an agreement with Khrushchev by which we took our missiles out of Greece and Turkey and guaranteed no further action against Castro in return for re¬ moval of Soviet missiles from Cuba, he felt that we had not re¬ ally won the Cuban missile confrontation. He quoted Khru¬ shchev, who had said, “I put the missiles into Cuba to keep Cas¬ tro in power, and if Castro is still in power, who then really won the Cuban missile crisis?” One of his closest aides said to me that General de Gaulle once told his entourage, “If the Americans will not fight for Cuba ninety miles from the United States, they will not fight for Europe three thousand, five hundred miles away. I must draw the conclusions from this that affect France’s independence and defense.” I cannot prove this, but nearly all of my contacts close to de Gaulle reflected something very like this. I recall the conversation with Eisenhower concerning the French nuclear capability and de Gaulle’s desire to have some means of nuclear deterrence of his own. I recall well his feeling that the United Nations would eventually be controlled by the third world, when he said to Eisenhower, “You are pushing these independence movements because you live forever under the illusion that George Washington was an Indian chief who drove out the British landlords, and therefore you feel you have to support all those who demand independence. The Soviets are pushing their support to independence movements because by evicting the colonial or metropolitan power, they hope to create a vacuum into which they intend to move. Because the two most powerful nations in the world are supporting this for en¬ tirely different reasons, it will be successful. Thus you will lose control of the United Nations to the third-world countries, who will inevitably be easily manipulated directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union.” General de Gaulle has not always been proved right, but he has on a number of such occasions shown remarka¬ ble foresight.
This does not mean that the United States may be led to blunder into using hybrid weapons of humanicide in Europe in this Indian Chief with firewater wisdom in getting into a fight in Europe which President Donald Trump should never ever be lured into again.
Nuff Said
agtG
