Getting Back our Credibility After Bush

Robert Farely has a great post at Lawyers, Gun$, and Money about the French ability to outmaneuver the United States in the U.N. This one line, though, got me thinking.

Chirac has also done an impressive job of resurrecting French cred in the Islamic world, no small task for a country once bitterly reviled for its colonial brutality in Syria and Algeria.

One thing I tell my students - the only thing history teaches us is that nothing is forever (except maybe China). Once the current band of rouges in the White House is gone, we've got a long road ahead of us to clean up the mess. But if the French can restore their credibility in the Islamic world after Algeria, maybe we can, too. Of course, that war was over in 1962.