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Recently, I read that after 31 years of reign, the Labrador Retriever was ousted as the top US dog breed, by non other than the French Bulldog. The article continues that such a feat has been achieved , partly due to promotions through celebrities owning them, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
The other day, as I was thinking about the various event anniversaries (especially war and violence anniversaries) I realized that 2023 is the 20th anniversary of US and UK (accompanied by Spain) invasion of Iraq, to which France was strongly opposed and threatened to veto the vote in the Security Council. Consequently, there was no mandate from the Security Council for the invasion; An invasion based on inaccurate claims, not to mention lies.
The Iraq invasion of 2003 brings to mind the story of French Fries turning into Freedom Fries, because the Americans felt the French had betrayed them during that period. I remember sitting in France and reading about the situation and watching anecdotal reports on it.
Starting from a restaurant in North Carolina changing the name to Freedom fries in February 2003, the matter became of national interest, when the then Republican chairman of the Committee on House Administration, Bob Ney, renamed the menu item in three Congressional cafeterias. I also recall during that time, France’s past, real or imaginary, came out in typical right-wing media, about its WWII Vichy past, and how De Gaulle kicked out NATO, and all the supposed awful things the country has done to the world and the Americans. No one, of course, brought up that France helped the revolutionaries during the war of independence, nor that the Statue of Liberty is a gift from France, nor that the whole Mississipi land was sold by France for a ‘good deal’, nor that the same De Gaulle sided with the US, when JFK pulled the Cuban missile crisis. Luckily, this anti-French charade was short lived, unlike the disaster the invasion made to the whole Middle East in general, and to Iraq, in particular.
What is the link between the French Bulldogs and French fries, you ask? Not much, except for the word ‘French’, and how France prevailed: The Iraq invasion has been judged severely by history, as the French President of the time, Jacques Chirac predicted, and French Bulldogs are reigning over the canine pet selection in the US!
Paris, April 13, 2023
Zeejay