via Herve Dufraux of La Table Francophone de Boulder
OK, folks, sit back with a dish of Freedom Fries and listen to a tale (it helps a lot if you read French).
Someone ("Youssouf") with a lot of time on their hands (quelle chance
pour lui) put together a satire comic based on a collage of pages from
the popular Tintin series. It
lambastes Bush and fellow cast members for the greed, intrigue and
arrogance that leads to the current situation in Iraq. It's clever, and
funny in patches, but it does take a good bit of filler to make up the
63 pages.
The cover panel (above) sets the mood:
Apportons leur la liberté! - Oui...Largons les bombes!
Let's bring them liberty! - Yeah...let's drop the bombs!
Some particular gems:
Page 3, which is a neat summary of how the Kurds and Southern Shi'ites must have felt in 1991.
Asked whether Hussein had been captured, the adjutant says:
Pas du tout!... Les américains ont finalement décidé de quitter l'Irak et de laisser le régime de Saddam Hussein en place!... Ils ont peur que celui-ci ne soit remplacé par une république islamiste chiite!
Not at all. The Americans have finally decided to leave Iraq and leave Hussein's regime in place. They're scared he'll be replaced by a Shi'a Islamic republic!
Pages 4-6 dramatize the supposed intrigue of Petroleum multinationals to encourage an invasion of Iraq and Bush's eagerness to do so. They're followed by an unnecessarily cynical take on the role of September 11th in justification of war (that part really annoyed me).
Pages 10 through 12 are the hilarious center of the piece, first dramatizing the back and forth over UN inspectors and conditions for avoiding war as a chess game between Bush and Hussein, which "Bush" ends by jumping to his feet and shooting over "Hussein's" head (I expect Hergé would be rolling in his grave at the use of Tintin as the face of the odious Hussein, but that's the one flaw in that sequence).
It climaxes with "Bush"'s boast:
Je suis la première puissance du monde!... Ha! ha!... Je fais ce que je veux!... Malgré toute cette comédie, par un moyen ou un autre, tu verra: il y aura une guerre en Irak!
I'm the foremost world power!... Haha!... I do what I want!... Despite all this fooling around, one way or another, you will see: there will be a war in Iraq!
Followed by a full page panel, cutting to "Osama bin Laden", who laughs:
Tu as raison de rire, George... ha! ha!... Moi aussi, j'en ris déjà de cette guerre...et de ce qui va s'ensuivre...
You're right to laugh, George... Haha! I'm also already laughing over this war...and over what will follow from it...
It gets to be a bit of a plod of increasingly extravagant schemes for pressing Hergé's images into the service of the satire, but don't miss the absurdist/slapstick ending, which includes the following sage words of advice from "Lionel Jospin":
Fumer un joint avec Romain Goupil est certainement moins dangereux que boire de l'alcool dans une mosquée de Nadjaf!
Smoking a joint with Romain Goupil is indeed less dangerous than drinking alcohol in a Najaf mosque!
Umm...er...yeah...no doubt...I'd say. What would we do without those maddening Gauls?
Peace, y'all.