Bernard Kouchner - 2 comments

I don't know whether it says more about UK media priorities or French foreign policy that I'd completely forgotten that former Socialist Minister (now expelled from the PS) and Médecins Sans Frontières co-founder, Bernard Kouchner, is Minister for Foreign and European Affairs in Nicholas Sarkozy's UMP administration.

This is especially poor, considering I've recently finished Paul Berman's Power And The Idealists, which covers the lives of left-wing '68-ers Joschka Fischer (the former German Foreign Minister) and Kouchner, amongst others, in some detail, together with the humanitarian/interventionist causes and battles they have been associated with ever since, amid the oscillations of the left in Europe and in the USA. Though Berman is one of those authors with an unimpeachable left/liberal reputation who is frequently derided as a "neocon", it's a great little book, from which I could easily have quoted big chunks of of the later pages.

As for Kouchner, it's encouraging that a left-winger with a humanitarian track-record has the power, and a skin thick enough, to remind people of the danger of an Iranian nuclear programme, and to start to build a consensus that the regime in Tehran must not be allowed - one way or another, whether the UN can be relied upon, or just Europe - to succeed in holding the Middle East, and its own population, hostage with nuclear weapons.

Update (18/09): minor tweaks.
Update (28/09): I notice Soumaya Ghannoushi has stepped in over at CiF. I think it's fair to say that I disagree with her political views more profoundly than I do any mainstream politician in the UK. This is, of course, no coincidence, given her track record as an arrogant and unprincipled apologist for dictators, for Islamism, and against liberal values:

All he [Sarkozy, Kouchner] stands to gain is the dubious honour of being known as Bush's new poodle, and having angry protesters against US foreign policy burn his effigy instead of Blair's.

Give me Sarkozy any day of the week.