felix qui possit rerum cognoscere causas
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December 27, 2002
Poland's eyes on the future
There are reports that Poland will be buying F-16's from the United States, rather than European-built combat aircraft. The news was leaked by the chairman of the French defense contractor Dassault, which had been hoping to sell its Mirage fighters to the Poles. Aside from the technical aspects the deal has obvious political symbolism too, and this was not lost on Dassault's chairman: Dassault broke the news of its own defeat, saying it dealt a blow to attempts to build a common European defence identity less than two weeks after the European Union invited Poland and nine other countries to join in 2004.Good! Talk about positive externalities. "I felt for a long time that they were very much in favour of the Americans," Dassault chief executive officer Charles Edelstenne told French radio.Puzzling, isn't it? What have the Americans ever done for Poland? Especially compared to the French, whose contributions in selling them out have been so memorable. Have the Poles forgotten already? "The political element was the dominant element, well above the quality of the equipment and its price."Ooooh, overly acidic grapes anyone? "Above all, they have made an American choice," he said.Absolutely. It's a very wise move too. Staying friends with America is far more important than ingratiating oneself with the garlic munching capitulation weasels. At a time when it's popular in western Europe to bash the Americans, the Poles can be sure that President Bush will remember. The Poles have chosen wisely. Dziękujemy bardzo! Comments
This might have something to do with the fact that the U.S. government recently loaned the Poles nearly $4 billion to purchase new fighters... http://www.keypublishing.com/news/default.asp?new_type=Military#114 To razumie sie samo, prawda? Posted by: vaara on December 27, 2002 10:59 AMAh yes, the wonderful world of arms procurement! I think all of the packages (both Dassault and BAe/Saab) included juicy kickbacks to the Poles. The headline figure you see in these deals is seldom relevant; the small print always contains tons of sweeteners and kickbacks. Legal kickbacks, I mean, in the form of investment in the country that's doing the buying. Arms procurement on this scale is seldom based a rational cost/benefit analysis of the actual equipment itself. Czy pan mówie po polsku? Tak, ale bardzo zle... teraz znam, ze w poprzedniem pismie jest blad (I should have said, "to rozumie sie samo *przez sie*"). I hate when that happens! BTW, I am typing the special characters and they do show up in the edit screen... then they disappear when I hit "Post." Szkoda. Posted by: vaara on December 27, 2002 12:34 PMWell, your Polish is still way better than mine! As for the special characters, it seems Movable Type strips them from comment forms. The way I get them to show both here in comments as well as on the blog is to type the HTML character entities directly. So to get mówie to show, I actually had to type mówie. This is the proper way of showing non-standard characters that ought to work with all browsers, regardless of settings. This is another reason I am hoping Schröder will be gone soon; I'm getting really tired of typing Schöder every time. I've been thinking of writing a plug-in to take care of these conversions automatically, but I've been too lazy thus far. Yes, I suppose that from a strictly lexicographical point of view, Stoiber would have been preferable. Anyway, it's funny you should mention the German election, since I was in Poland during the two weeks prior to it. Posted by: vaara on December 28, 2002 06:47 PMPost a comment
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