The French Disease
In a development that no doubt has neocon strategists gnashing their teeth with impotent rage, Chinese premier Hu Jintao visited France today and openly pledged to join the two countries in a new Axis of Sanity. Of course, I made that term up, but what he really said was China and France would deepen a strategic partnership to “work for a safer, more diverse and united world.” (Hu Qihua Presidents sign up for a peaceful world China Daily Jan. 28, 2004).
In a further piece of ominous synchronicity, Kofi Annan was in France, too! At a time when the U.S. is looking for the U.N. to save its bacon, Annan opined that the only feasible way for the U.N. to engage intensively in Iraq would be through “a multinational force authorized by the Security Council”. (Agencies via Xinhua UN to send election assessment team to Iraq China Daily Jan. 28, 2004)
Zoot alours! That means the French (and Chinese) have to be on board!
Now, with stammering endorsement of the Bush foreign policy team, Kofi Annan is sending a team to Iraq to survey the feasibility of the early, direct elections demanded by Ayatollah Sistani.
Tres, tres bad news..
Bush might try to find some solace from the fact that Annan apparently believes that direct elections in time for the beloved June 30 handover are unfeasible.
Remember, June 30 is that mysteriously precious and sacrosanct date — that one arbitrary element in the whole jury-rigged Rube Goldberg apparatus of the U.S.-engineered transition — that is “set in stone” and “non-negotiable”.
The June 30 date is a classic canard. It is marketed and widely regarded across the political spectrum as a classic piece of Rovian legerdemain, the moth-eaten rabbit that Bush will drag out of his hat during the election campaign to prove to the country that we have successfully exited Iraq and can all “move on”.
The true significance of June 30 is the very fact that it is impossible to hold direct elections by that date. That’s why Bush is insisting on it.
If direct elections are held, Rummy will find himself trying to negotiate with a suspicious, independent, and empowered Sh’ia state for the basing agreement America needs to keep its tens of thousands of troops in Iraq.
Will a government that is not politically beholden to and militarily reliant upon the United States for its domestic standing allow its nation’s oil, will, and freedom to be drained by the Pentagon/Halliburton incubus?
Not too likely. The more united and ready for power the Shi’as appear, the less Bush wants direct democracy in Iraq.
It should be no surprise that the Bush fallback position in case the caucus farce collapses is an expanded, new and improved July 1 version of the IGC — the same discredited regime whose extinction is the whole point of the transition exercise.
If Kofi Annan nixes June 30 elections on logistic grounds, can the Bush team breathe a sigh of relief at having dodged the bullet one more time?
Will Ayatollah Sistani, who has to date orchestrated the Sh’ia political movement with considerable subtlety, forethought, and quiet determination, slap his head with a self-deprecating Doh! (Direct elections by June 30! What the heck was I thinking?!), retire to Najaf for a heavy Koran session, and let the U.S. shove a rejiggered puppet government down Iraq’s throat in time for the magic June 30 date?
Not too likely.
The truth is that the United States, which has desperately tried to prove itself the absolute master of Iraq, has lost control of the transition process. And June 30 is now, to the horror of the Bush administration, in play.
The UN, which was supposed to be a passive, powerless bystander in the Iraq drama, has been invited in by Sistani — and its participation is suddenly endorsed by a panic-stricken, disoriented United States.
The US finds itself in the position of one of those cuckolded husbands in a French romance, pacing distractedly outside the door of the confessional as the coy wife frolics with the cunning cleric.
Look for Annan and Sistani to emerge from their tryst flushed and satisfied with the fact that they can discuss the fate of Iraq as free and equal partners out from under the goonish shadow of the United States.
Also look for them to conclude that elections are extremely feasible — maybe in fall 2004? - and there is no point in diverting Iraqi energies and unity to spend the summer erecting the useless façade of a compromised, illegitimate, US-mandated regime.
Or as Annan already said in Paris, “I have concluded that the United Nations can play a constructive role in helping to break the current impasse…The mission will ascertain the views of a broad spectrum of Iraqi society in the search for alternatives that might be developed to move forward to the formation of a provisional government.” (China Daily ibid)
What’s Bush going to do? Will he regretfully advise the Iraqis that their beloved liberator will be fully occupied in third-quarter 2004 woofing down rubber chicken and prostituting himself before corporate contributors on the domestic US campaign circuit, so accept the June 30 date or take a hike?
If so, then Sistani instructs a quarter-million Sh’ias to hit the streets demanding quick, direct elections, and Bush either has to shoot them or back down.
The proper US response to this set of circumstances is Oh Shit.
Or more accurately, Merde.
If our Iraq adventure goes south in the next few months, we won’t be able to blame the French; but we should blame Bush’s anti-French policy.
Call it our French disease.
This disease is the cause, and not the symptom, of the intense malaise of the multi-lateral system that has caused mastery of the UN and control of Iraq’s future to slip from the hands of the United States. It epitomizes Bush administration hubris — the satisfying but ultimately fatal delusion that the world can be remade as it desires through overt hostility, force, deception, and opportunism.
The Bush administration’s anti-French stance, like its detestation of Saddam Hussein, is not a sign of anger, conviction, or righteous resentment. It is calculated, malicious, and ultimately counterproductive to American interests.
Unless you were vomiting in a gutter on Bourbon Street, you probably missed the news that the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase in New Orleans this last December was snubbed by both Bush and Chirac in another testimony to the sad decline in French-American relations.
But you probably picked up on the buzz about David Frum and Richard Perle’s new book, An End to Evil, which urges condign punishment for French presumption.
No, they aren’t worked up about that giant faux oil derrick the petrocarbon-challenged French erected in the center of Paris and call the Eiffel Tower.
They say they hate France because its independent foreign policy seeks to contain the U.S. and has therefore put our two countries in an adversarial relationship.
Nope.
IMHO, The Bush administration broadcasts its detestation of France because it covets France’s seat and veto on the Security Council and hopes to force a confrontation at the proper time on U.S. terms.
When France is stripped of its seat, the precious veto can be allocated to a more useful and compliant buddy, one who can facilitate the further transformation of the UN into an obedient tool of US unilateral policy.
This is why France — an avowedly capitalistic, democratic state near the heart of the northern-hemisphere geopolitical order that powers the economies and global policies of both Europe and the United States — sees its diplomatic overtures spurned and the tensions in its relationship with the Bush administration gratuitously exacerbated almost to the point of breach.
At the height of the righteous U.S. harrumphing over U.N. spinelessness and French intransigence in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, both Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial page weighed in with stemwinders (or in Friedman’s case, a hair-tearer) about how the U.N. would be a better, more effective, and happier place if France’s security council seat somehow ended up in the hands of some more deserving country like India or Japan. (Thomas Friedman Vote France Off the Island New York Times, 2/19/03; Wall Street Journal Au Revoir, Security Council, March 2004)
India and Japan, by the way, were on tap to join the coalition of the willing before American diplomatic blundering made colluding in the Iraq invasion so politically toxic within their countries that the distant hope of glomming onto a Security Council veto was inadequate recompense.
The Wall Street Journal proposed that the US announce its departure from the Security Council, thereby condemning the UN to League of Nation irrelevance. This absurd shoot-oneself-in-one’s-own-foot strategy (abandon the UN Security Council, which is already a pretty useful tool of American interests, and a place where we have a veto?) was probably the cover for an ultimatum tactic: either France goes off the Security Council, or we do.
Of course, a plan this audacious couldn’t get accomplished unless France got the full Axis of Evil treatment and was ostracized from the family of nations a la Saddam’s Iraq and Kim’s DPRK.
I’m speculating that at the heart of the U.S. stance was the realization that France was playing footsie with Saddam diplomatically and economically and there was the expectation that somehow this could all be turned to profitable account after Iraq was conquered. Ahmed Chalabi would become president by popular acclamation, the Iraqi populace would spit out the tainted Vichy water of Gallic accommodation, and the bureaucracy would hop to it to provide their American liberators with embarrassing dirt on French engagement with Saddam’s regime.
Like the whole WMD thing — also founded on the rosiest of expectations and most cynical determination to get the most mileage out of the minimum amount of facts — the anti-France campaign, after a few false alarms like “French missiles seized in Iraq!” came to naught.
And like the WMD thing, the neocons have refused to give the French thing up. Even with their game plan in disarray, they hope to throw a Hail Mary pass and spike Jacques Chirac and his Security Council seat into the end zone.
Their secret weapon: Saddam Hussein.
I find it interesting that it was in early December that Paul Wolfowitz — when he probably knew Saddam was in the net of our special forces, Kurdish militiamen, the Mary Kay rep who serviced his spider hole, or whoever really got him — chose to spit in France’s eye again by excluding French and other non-coalition firms from Iraq reconstruction contracts.
James Baker’s contemporaneous mission to patch up things in Europe and renegotiate Iraqi debt was, needless to say, DOA.
Instead of rapprochement with France and Europe, are we playing the Saddam card instead?
I also find it interesting that Saddam was granted (and I use the term pointedly, “granted”) US POW status, thereby shielding him from Iraqi justice. The U.S., after all, is not going to get much political mileage out of a show trial in Baghdad presided over by Ahmed Chalabi rehashing both the horrors of Saddam’s campaigns against the Kurds and Shi’ites and the embarrassing American complicity in his rule.
It would be much nicer if Saddam could be prevailed upon to dish the dirt on France — and to a lesser extent, Germany and Russia — in return for a nice, brief war crimes trial in The Hague and comfy life imprisonment in the Bastille of his choosing.
And if two weeks before the U.S. elections he suddenly remembers he sent all his WMDs to Syria for safekeeping, oooh baby!
I expect that Saddam is being treated to the usual good cop bad cop routine, with the bad cop threatening to toss him into the meatgrinder of New Iraq justice if he doesn’t cough up the right evidence on the nefarious frogs.
But why bother?
After a year of bullheadedly unilateralist U.S. blundering on Iraq, it doesn’t seem likely that the other nations that matter would really care, even in the unlikely event the U.S. could come up with a truly damning bill of indictment against France.
After all, in the U.N. scheme of things, the only white-bread nation that deserves to lose its Security Council veto now is the United Kingdom, which has revealed itself to be nothing more than a vermiform appendage of U.S. imperial policy and has no meaningful national or regional voice of its own. The French, love ‘em or hate ‘em, speak for much of Europe and probably receive the secret thanks of the underdeveloped world for taking the heat in standing up to the U.S.
So don’t count on the Bush administration’s anti-France campaign to generate anything more productive than confrontation, anger, and intensified resentment of U.S. arrogance.
And don’t look for the U.N. to cut the world’s only superpower a lot of slack when direct negotiations with Sistani and support for direct elections give it a way to salvage a measure of prestige and credibility from the humiliation the US has subjected it to on Iraq.
But the neocons don’t care. They’ll just keep sticking their finger in the wound of French-American relations, rubbing in the dirt, infecting it, turning it into a running sore, and making it harder for the forces of prudence and reason to heal it.
Sooner or later they hope their day will come, and the relationship will die.
But in the meantime, the victims of their French disease will be America’s international standing, our adventure in Iraq, and — if we’re lucky — the Bush administration itself.
