Matthew Engel on the deliberate policy of the Bushies to target the French.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Death to French fries
Vilification of the enemy is normal in wartime. But, last we heard, the French were not the actual enemy. No one is going round blaming the Swiss, the Pope or the Quakers. No one is even saying much about the Iraqis, who were pretty much assumed to be onlookers until the weekend. Saddam himself has had nothing to compare with the post-September 11 odium heaped on Osama.

Most interestingly, no one is now denouncing the Germans either. And the truth behind that represents one of the more fascinating secrets of the past few weeks.

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A month ago, all the bile for the failure to get UN support for their war was being directed at Germany. This reached its peak when Donald Rumsfeld created his own personal second-tier axis of evil, lumping the Germans together with Cuba and Libya as countries that would never, ever help the US.

Then, suddenly and deliberately, there was silence on that front: the verbal guns were trained one square further west. This was a very high-level Anglo-American decision and official sources explained that it was only fair: the Germans were not on the security council last autumn when resolution 1441 was passed and therefore had no obligation to support it; it was different with the "poisonous" French. That is a rationale, but hardly a reason.

The reason is harder to get at. The one thing we do know is that the change came at the very end of February, immediately after a visit to Washington by Angela Merkel, the German opposition leader, who was granted an A-list schedule, seeing just about everyone who matters except the president himself. Her public statements were strongly pro-American; privately, it is thought, she told Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice to back off, because the more they attacked the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, the more they strengthened him politically. There are no comparable political divisions in France.

Britain went along with this strategy of assisting the German right, suggesting that the prime minister's journey towards becoming Ramsay MacBlair is continuing apace.

The boobs who get egged on by the US rightwing media are, I think, more comfortable with the new stance. German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in the country, and are especially strong in the heartland. As a group they prefer to keep their heads down politically, for obvious historical reasons. But an awful lot of people are at least part-German. In contrast, the concept of "French-American" hardly exists. Most Americans have probably never met a Frenchman, nor drunk French wine, eaten French cheese or driven a French car. Indeed, French culture has been in full retreat in the US for some time. The secondary language of choice in schools is now Spanish, for obvious demographic reasons. French is associated with the folks who go to fancy restaurants, vote Democratic and talk of Mer-LOW, Ren-WA and Van GO.

France thus fits the bill as a hateful and remote enemy, a role the Iraqis cannot fulfil. We hope and trust the vast majority of them believe they are being liberated. But the more they fight, the more it suggests that some, even outside the tyrannical elite, actually resent having their country invaded. And that thought is a little hard to contemplate right now.