A Position of Principle
Le Monde Editorial
Saturday 15 February 2003
Diplomacy is repetition. France said simple things, stated principles on Friday February 14, at the UN through the voice of Dominique de Villepin. It was not the objective, but along the way, the Foreign Affairs Minister pulverized certain more or less insulting nonsense that had been hammered out in some of the American and British press. No, it's not the oil, and still less trade that doesn't amount to more than a few hundred million Euros, that explains France's position on Iraq; still less a supposed obsession to systematically oppose the United States, a country with which, whatever Richard Perle, the gloomy Pentagon counselor, may think, France wants to maintain alliance and friendship; and still less some Munichist atavism on the part of a nation which has soldiers in absolutely all international forces- and which does not expect that there be "zero mortality'' among them.
From the beginning of this affair, Jacques Chirac has maintained three basic principles.
The first: the objective really is to make sure Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction which might fall into the arsenal of international terrorism. The second: the UN disarmament inspectors must have a reasonable opportunity to realize the first objective. The third: the use of force will take on the form of a North-South war, the West against the Arab-Islamic world, the exact strategic configuration Osama Bin Laden wants.
It's because this position is not totally without foundation that Mr.de Villepin, was able to swing the balance Friday from the strongest to the weakest and align twelve of the fifteen other members of the Security Council behind France's position. While it was being said that the minister was isolated in a flamboyant losing minority posture... Serious-mindedness requires that we add another thing. The French objective of disarmament by inspections would not be credible without the American army's deployment. Baghdad only conceded with gestures of flexibility under the military pressure of the United States. Complementarity?
Mr.de Villepin's message was also addressed to those in Washington who hope to use a war for other purposes than disarmament: to begin to remodel the political landscape of the Near East, even under Crusader missile showers and at the price for the United States of several years' occupation and administration of Iraq, a prospect, which, once again, could only delight Mr. Bin Laden! The final French principle, which does not exclude the use of force, targets those people. But any use of force may only be decided by the UN, all the more so because it is a question of an intervention that would have the quality of preventative war. The message is the obligation to apply a multilateral approach, a UN approach in an unstable world. And of the necessity to reject the sovereignty of power which some advocate in Washington and which turns its back on the complexity of the world and the universalism it demands.
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Translation: TruthOut French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher
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