Frenchmen I Can Agree With

This is just the sort of thing I was hoping for from new French President Nicolas Sarkozy:

Ahmadinejad at Columbia provided the entertainment, but Sarkozy at the U.N. provided the substance. On the largest possible stage — the U.N. General Assembly — President Nicolas Sarkozy put Iran on notice. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had said that France could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Sarkozy said that France cannot. He declared Iran’s nuclear ambitions “an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world.”

His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had earlier said that the world faces two choices — successful diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program or war. And Sarkozy himself has no great hopes for the Security Council, where China and Russia are blocking any effective action against Iran. He does hope to get the European Union to join the U.S. in imposing serious sanctions.

“Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace,” he warned. “They lead to war.” This warning about appeasement was intended particularly for Germany, which for commercial reasons has been resisting U.S. pressure to support effective sanctions.

Some of us have learned from the French attempt at appeasement of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s; it appears that Germany itself may not have learned anything, or forgotten what they learned. It also seems that our native lefties haven't quite comprehended the lessons of French appeasement either.