From the Weekly Standard’s “Scrapbook,” August 16:

Shortly after Bulgarian truck driver Georgi Lazov’s headless body was fished out of the Tigris River on July 14, his country’s NATO ambassador in Brussels, Emil Valev, proposed that the organization issue a statement condemning this and other hostage-takings in Iraq. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer did end up releasing such a statement, on July 20, calling these incidents “abhorrent” and “revolting,” and expressing “deepest sympathy” for the various victims’ families.

But he did so, THE SCRAPBOOK has learned, only over the initial objections of Benoit d’Aboville, France’s NATO envoy. Monsieur d’Aboville, one well-placed diplomat reports, dismissed his Bulgarian colleague’s request for an expression of support as ridiculous, arguing that all countries must learn to deal with hostage-takers as a matter of course, paying them off as necessary. Here, presumably, d’Aboville was communicating only his personal views and not the formal policy of France. At least we hope so.

This same Benoit d’Aboville has since been the subject of a most revealing and excellent profile by reporter Philip Shishkin in the August 2 Wall Street Journal. According to Shishkin, “fellow diplomats call [d’Aboville] the most outspoken and unpredictable ambassador NATO has seen in years,” a man “notorious for losing his composure at meetings.”

At one such session, for example, d’Aboville first “stormed out” of the room, by itself “an almost unheard-of breach of etiquette,” and then actually managed to make things worse by returning to his seat, where he “unfurled a French newspaper, interrupting his reading only to quote

Voltaire to disparage the speaker.”

Incidentally, d’Aboville “traces his lineage from an artillery colonel who helped the American colonies win a key battle of independence” (at Yorktown). It’s something he rather “likes to joke” about, in fact. To wit: “I always say that maybe my ancestor made the wrong choice in backing the insurgents.”

Figures that a man like Benoit d’Aboville would “always” like to mention his ancestors, doesn’t it? After all, he “who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.” Voltaire said that.

And while we’re at it, here’s another thing Voltaire said—though he never wrote it down himself, so far as I know: 

”Q: Why did the Frenchman cross the road?

”A: To surrender to the chicken.”¹

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¹Appears in the collected correspondence of the chevalier de Rohan.