Friday 7 Nov. 2003 By Paul Starobin, National Journal
Jacques Chirac and his camp, shaped by the Algerian war and
their own recent lessons in fighting terrorism, correctly predicted
the consequences of invading Iraq.
The French Were Right
Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the
end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11
world (and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do) :
The French were right. Let's say it again : The French -- yes, those
"cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United
States so pungently called them -- were right.
"Be careful !" That was the exclamation-point warning French President
Jacques Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16 interview
on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq.
"Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and
may be very dangerous," Chirac advised.
And this was not some last-minute heads-up, but the culmination
of a full-brief argument that the French advanced against the perils
of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over months at the United
Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris, Prague, and
Washington.
There were, of course, other war critics in Europe and elsewhere, but
nobody presented the arguments more insistently or comprehensively
than did the French, God bless 'em.
But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed
to the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad
idea, but that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to
Western interests and to the larger war on terror.
And now the administration is finding itself in an increasingly unhappy
situation in Iraq, with its 130,000-strong contingent there the target
of a sophisticated and lethal guerrilla campaign waged by foreign
Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to
Congress's backing of the president's request for $ 87 billion
for military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the White House strains to explain the failure, so far,
to find weapons of mass destruction, whose supposed presence
in the country, after all, was a prime rationale for the war.
Even avid war proponents concede that the United States is in for
"a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
wrote in a recently leaked memo.
America, in short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own
making.
Leave it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of
predicament. The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called
his 1944 play, on the suffering that human beings tend to visit on
themselves, No Exit.
In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration
got into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were
so mistaken.
But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the Administration
Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It Right."
To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck type
of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by partisan,
factional enmity.
But to ask why the French were right is to put the matter in a more
positive, constructive vein.
And the question has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter
of assigning historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary
rethinking of the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in
a fitful, truculent mood, has in any event already begun, with its
recent plea for help from the United Nations and other countries,
France included, and its stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in
charge of security.
Hold on. Were the French really right ?
After all, Iraq is not a finished matter. What looks like a mess
today may yet get sorted out. Most supporters of the war
continue to believe it was justified, despite the problems it
has caused.
Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that the French, and
in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain analytical
purchase on the situation that the Bush administration lacked.
The French made three basic claims - all countered, in varying
degrees of intensity, by the administration.
The first was that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent,
and that's borne out by all available evidence, not least the latest
report by Bush-appointed arms inspector David Kay, in which
he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had been found.
The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was going
to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process - with the Iraqi population
very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not liberators.
Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by various
fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a majority
of Iraqis would like the United States to leave.
And third, the French correctly predicted that the Muslim world
would perceive a U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing
of the United Nations as illegitimate - and thus would incite even
greater anger toward America.
"A war in Iraq could trigger more frustration, bitterness, in the Arab
world and beyond, in the Muslim world," Jean-David Levitte, French
ambassador to the U.S., warned in remarks on February 7 at the U.S.
Institute of Peace in Washington. Touche. "Hostility toward America has
reached shocking levels," an administration-appointed panel, headed by
a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Edward Djerejian, recently reported
on post-invasion attitudes in the Muslim world.
Still seething over the French prewar position on Iraq, administration
officials are hardly of a mind to bestow awards on the French for
prescience.
The Democrats, many of whom supported the war, would have no
political gain in citing the unpopular French as role models for their
thinking, even if the statements now made by the party's leaders in
Congress and its presidential candidates so closely resemble prewar
French comments. ("The war was an unnecessary war," retired Gen.
Wesley Clark pronounced, a la Chirac, on October 9.)
As for the administration, even Secretary of State Colin Powell,
a relative moderate, still gets huffy at the mention of the French.
"We were right, they were wrong, and I am here," a Powell aide,
in an interview with The New York Times, quoted his boss as
saying at a September meeting with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.
U.S. media presentations of the French arguments have been
on a similar plane.
The "cheese-eatin'" tag (would that be Brie or Roquefort? ) derives
from an eight-year-old episode of the animated television show
The Simpsons, in which a reluctant teacher of French greets his
elementary-school charges with the rousing salutation "Bonjour,
ye cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys !"
It fell to a pop-culturally informed conservative polemicist, National
Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to revive and popularize the insult
in the prewar name-calling. The New York Post is still calling the
French "weasels."
From the tenor of the discussion, in Washington and the hinterlands,
you might think that the Elysee Palace opposes by reflex whatever
the White House says. But the French are only selectively stubborn.
France was the only country, other than the United States, to conduct
air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with their Mirage jets and
Super Etenard fighters hitting more than 30 targets during Operation
Anaconda in March 2002. The French enthusiastically backed the
Afghanistan war, breaking with Washington only on the Iraq question.
No more persuasive is the widely voiced (in the U.S.) argument that
the French were defending wide-reaching and profitable commercial
relationships with Saddam's regime.
The truth is that France enjoyed minor economic ties with Saddam.
Under the United Nations' now-defunct Oil for Food program with
Saddam's Iraq, the French were only the 13th-largest participant.
The U.S. under that program bought more than 50 percent of Iraq's
total oil exports, the French 8 percent.
So the answer to the question of why the French were right has to
begin with an admission that their intransigence cannot be dismissed
as a knee-jerk impulse or narrowly self-interested plank. Au contraire.
What divided the two longtime allies -- each of which has been a
beacon for liberal Western values over the past two centuries -- was
a deep analytical chasm. An understanding of how the French got to
the place they got to and stubbornly clung to, even as relations with
Washington badly deteriorated, requires a probe of the substance
and roots of the French position.
That may not sound like much fun. Even though they deny it, the
French are already gloating that their much-maligned prewar forecast
has proved to be on target. But here's the good news -- and it really
is very good news. One big reason the French were right is that they
were thinking along the lines that Americans are generally apt to think -
that is, in a cautious, pragmatic way, informed by their own particular
trial-and-error experience, in this case as an occupier forced out of
Algeria and as a front-line battler, long before 9/11, against global
Islamic terrorist groups.
The Bush administration, by contrast, approached Iraq the way
the French are often thought to approach large world problems
- with a grandiose sweep of the theoretical hand, a tack exemplified
by the big-ideas neoconservative crowd, whose own thinking,
ironically, draws on European political philosophy.
So as the administration rethinks Iraq, the way back to a sound
position may lie at home, in the great but neglected tradition
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More : http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2003/1107nj1.htm
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