While the dishonest and the stupid are attempting to railroad everyone into military endeavours devoid of public benefit, let us remember that France stood out of the Iraq war because it had independent orbital imaging capabilities showing that the WMD claims were nonsense... Meanwhile, the USA took for a ride all the blind ones who had decided that US imagery was cheaper and good enough.
Military sovereignty is also about being able to remain peaceful - let us remember that next time the time for budget cuts come: ▻http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/spies-for-europe
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The original statement is in this Ken Silverstein piece (▻http://harpers.org/sb-creating-th-1149534425.html):
“They say everyone else was wrong,” said this former official, “but we conditioned them to be wrong. We spend [tens of billions of dollars per year] on signals intelligence and when we reach a conclusion, the people who spend less than that tend to believe us. They weren’t wrong, they chose to believe us. The British, Germans, and Italians don’t have all those overhead assets, so they rely on us. Historically they have been well-served, so they believe us when we tell them the earth is round. The French have their own assets—and guess what? They didn’t go with us”
Guilhem Penent, of France’s IFRI and IRSEM thinktanks, writes in the Space Review (▻http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2340/1) as follows:
“Regarding outer space, France’s main objective is to perpetuate its autonomy and national sovereignty. As sovereignty is the state of determining itself based on its own will without depending on other nations, satellites are, first and foremost, the guarantee of France’s autonomy in assessment and thereby in decision-making”
The decision not to follow the US in 2003 was thus taken by then President Jacques Chirac in accordance with intelligence based for the most part on Earth-imaging satellite HELIOS 1, whose findings were in contradiction which was being said at the UN Security Council. When the war in South Ossetia broke out in 2008 between Russia and Georgia, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, as chair of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), used images provided by HELIOS 1 and HELIOS 2 to deny Russia’s allegations about the withdrawal of its troops when those troops were actually progressing southward.
This is the first public confirmation, I believe, that the French did in fact stand out of the Iraq war because HELIOS imagery showed that the WMD claims were nonsense
