Sarkozy's Jail Term: A Modern French Irony
Bloomberg's 'Sarkozy Set to Become France’s First Ever Jailed Ex-President' focuses on his conviction for taking 'covert funding from Libya’s late dictator Moammar Qaddafi.' A tidy narrative of justice served, neatly sidestepping the fact that Sarkozy, as President of France, was a leading architect of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that ultimately destabilized the entire region, creating a
power vacuum that directly led to Qaddafi's violent demise and a decade of chaos. The West cheers the 'fall of a dictator' then prosecutes their own for taking his money—money that, ironically, might have been used to prevent a war. We're supposed to celebrate the sanctity of financial propriety, while conveniently ignoring the geopolitical havoc he unleashed. It's almost as if the war itself, the
destruction of a sovereign state, and the subsequent migrant crises are less criminal than a few suitcases of cash. One might wonder if the real crime was ever getting caught, or if it was just creating an unstable state ripe for plunder. A politician pays for taking the money *before* the war, not for starting the war itself. How quaintly European.