Ugly Americans in Paris

[dArKeR]

The conventional wisdom at this year's Paris Air Show was that Donald Rumsfeld's temper tantrum and Russia's shaky financial status were going to take all the fun out of the world's largest arms bazaar and aerospace exhibition, held each June at historic Le Bourget airport in Paris's gritty northern industrial suburbs.

Since Rumsfeld had refused to send US combat aircraft to Paris to "punish" the French for not supporting Washington in Gulf War II, and Moscow was afraid to send fighter planes for fear that a Swiss creditor might confiscate them, commentators were droning on about how the "firepower" would be missing from Le Bourget this year--or "US Drizzles Over Paris Salon's Sizzle," as Aviation International News put it in a front-page headline.

While the journalists were preparing for gloom and doom, someone apparently forget to tell the scores of nations, hundreds of exhibitors and hundreds of thousands of members of the general public who came to the show to follow suit. Under unseasonably warm 80-degree skies, against a backdrop of puffy clouds punctuated by the occasional quick thunderstorm, tens of thousands watched French pilots dominate the air over Le Bourget at a show whose theme seemed to be "we can do business just fine without America, thank you very much."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=hartung

http://darkerxdarker.tripod.com/

[searchingforlight]

1. Heres to the French