Sarkozy

Paris

The New York Times reports on the French elections: 

Jackson Diehl notes it “is not exactly a bombshell” that “[Israeli prime minister] Binyamin Netanyahu seems to have been the target of some ugly — if off the record — barbs from President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.”

The Israeli news website Ynet reports: 

French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly told US President Barack Obama that he could not "stand" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he thinks the Israeli premier "is a liar."

According to a Monday report in the French website "Arret sur Images," after facing reporters for a G20 press conference on Thursday, the two presidents retired to a private room, to further discuss the matters of the day.

Both the so-called Republican Forces loyal to the new Ivoirian president Alassane Ouattara and French officials have been at great pains to insist that deposed president Laurent Gbagbo was captured by Ouattara’s troops and not by French troops. This is not what was initially reported. But, in any case, as an article in Tuesday’s edition of the French daily Libération puts it, “nobody is fooled.”

CNN reports:

Military action against the Moammar Gadhafi regime could begin in the coming hours, a French government spokesman said on Friday, hours after the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force to protect besieged civilians in Libya.

Speaking in an interview with RTL radio, Francois Baroin said France plans to participate in what he described as "swift" efforts.

A disheartening report from Josh Rogin on the G8 foreign ministers' meeting on Libya. "Inside the foreign ministers' meeting, a loud and contentious debate erupted about whether to move forward with stronger action to halt Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's campaign against the Libyan rebels and the violence being perpetrated against civilians," Rogin reports.

The Obama administration has been recklessly cautious -- and has even go so far as to say that the president "doesn’t want to fall into a Libya trap." But the trap in this case might be to do nothing at all.

The European edition of Newsweek has discovered the face of European extremism. It peers out from the cover of the October 4 issue of the magazine. It consists neither of the hoary features of French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, nor the fresher look of the blond-coiffed Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders. “Europe’s New Extreme” reads the headline. And the face on the cover is none other than that of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. “Sarkozy and the Rise of the Hard Right,” the sub-title runs.

The Obama administration was never much bothered by the fact that a NATO ally, France, is selling offensive weapons to a NATO adversary, Russia. Never mind that Russia remains in clear violation of the French-brokered cease-fire to the 2008 war in Georgia – after all, if that doesn’t bother the French, why should it bother us? This administration has made clear that Georgia, and America’s other allies in Eastern Europe (the Czechs and the Poles in particular), will be sacrificed on the altar of ‘reset’ if necessary. Still, as the Obama administration has learned over the last year, dealing with the Russians is a tricky business – you never have a deal until you have a deal, and even then you may not have a deal.

Small groups, gathered in meeting rooms scattered around the world and focused on a single issue, can affect the way we live, at least now and perhaps for a long time. Consider only this week’s conclaves.

Here in Washington, the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy gurus met and decided to keep interest rates low until unemployment drops, even though they agreed that the economy is already improving. Meanwhile, meeting in committee rooms and in the corridors of power, Congress agreed to give the White House what its economists and the president, meeting in the Oval Office, demanded: more stimulus spending. It is true that there is considerable excess capacity in the economy, as the deflation-worriers continually point out. But anyone who believes that the meetings at the Fed, in congress, and in the White House are not laying the ground for future inflation carries a heavy burden of proof.