[babebridou]

To be honest, as a French person I didn't see anything new in this cable. None of this was secret, it was pretty much the official stance, except stripped of the humanitarian aspects such as the ongoing civil war and repression or the Arab Spring.

It feels like Hillary's advisor was merely watching French TV and transcribing what journalists and politicians said publicly. The mention of Bernard Henri-Levy proves it. When you sum up a geopolitical situation in a few sentence, you don't waste any explaining BHL is a "semi-joke", unless your own knowledge is cursory.

With regards to the French population, you have to put it in context (April 2011, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Arab_Spring ). The Arab Spring was still going "smoothly" elsewhere, and we were all watching Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and Algeria where things were handled "more or less peacefully" back then, at least to the French eye. Qadaffi's repression, on the other hand, was violent from the get-go.

It was a perfect storm (1) for Sarkozy, as on top of the things mentioned in the cable, he had to prove that he was serious with his Mediterranean Union, and more importantly he had to disprove the allegations that Qadaffi financed his election.

Wether it was the right thing to do or not, I personally have no idea, but it was pretty much a no-brainer at the time for France to distance itself from Qadaffi during his civil war, and fuel the opposition.

(1): unrelated, but maybe I should have said "homerun" in this case? My English fails me.

[s_q_b]

(1) Nope, you're correct.

"Perfect storm" refers to a confluence of events combining at the same time to create an extreme outcome.

Home run generally refers to a singular event of great benefit, an analogy that derives from baseball.

Your English is much better than you think, especially with grasping idioms. I've seen worse in HYP writing seminars.

[bsaul]

As a french person, i beg to differ. The only publicaly stated reasons for the intervention was humanitarian, to prevent kadafi from decimating his own population. You could read other opinions on various newspapers, but nothing really based on facts, only more or less valid assumptions depending on your political background.

[babebridou]

That's true for the most part, I mean, the government obviously didn't mention some of the things that are in the cable unless they deliberately wanted to shoot themselves in the foot, but the news would systematically feature pieces about Qadaffi's awkward presence on Bastille Day along with the oil, gold and silver.

My point is that the cable was nothing more than a short compilation of common knowledge and hearsay, like you said, "more or less valid assumptions" that you could easily get by switching radio channels a few times during your tuesday morning commute.