From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. French

obstructionism on the American War March to Baghdad has had predictable reactions in the U.S.

press. The term cheese-eating surrender monkeys has been invoked, for instance. And with the future

of the NATO alliance, perhaps hanging in the balance,

says Martin Walker of United Press International, some European editorialists have also succumbed

to French bashing. I was particularly struck by a long column in the Daily Telegraph this week

by Boris Johnson, who's a British member of parliament, and also editor of the weekly The Spectator.

The way he puts it is,

if I were Tony Blair, I'd be feeling really rather grateful to the French this week,

because the British press has dropped its concerns in favour of that time

on its staple of the British journalist, the orgy of frog bashing.

You know the kind of articles. They involve

references to vichy, tanks with reverse gears, garlic guzzling peasants, women of loose morals

cozing up to German occupiers, and they usually end with the cry, and those Frenchmen

eat our children's ponies. That is pretty much the blizzard of abuse that the French have been getting in the

British press. And the French have been really, I think, really quite mature about it. Liberation,

the left-wing French Daily, said, what we are witnessing now is simply the old American

cocktail of missionary zeal and crude real politic. We've been there before and will be

there again. I want to turn to the Arab world for a moment. Much of the editorial commotion in the

last two weeks has been in the wake of Secretary Powell's dramatic presentation to the United Nations

in which he attempted to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein

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