WSJ.com
Antiwar Camp Feels Strain
Of Repairing Ties to U.S.
The peace camp of France, Germany and Russia, appears to be dissolving in the wake of the U.S.-led victory over Saddam Hussein.
The three countries worked closely together inside the United Nations Security Council earlier this year to deny U.N. backing to any U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. Since the coalition's three-week war ended, however, the antiwar camp's common front has begun to crack, as each struggles to repair damaged bilateral relations with Washington. The urgency of that fence-mending task was underscored earlier this week, when Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview that France would suffer unspecified consequences for having opposed Washington.
Fissures were exposed clearly Tuesday, when France proposed at a closed Security Council meeting to suspend U.N. sanctions against Iraq immediately, with a view to lifting them once U.N. inspectors have declared Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction. But the gesture was not only blasted as insufficient by the U.S., but it also seemed to surprise Russia's ambassador to the U.N., Sergei Lavrov.
Mr. Lavrov on Tuesday repeated Russia's position that the sanctions against Iraq cannot be lifted until it has been determined whether Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. He said he would look at the French proposal, but didn't endorse it. That may change if the French and Americans can ultimately agree on a preliminary suspension, but it is a big turnaround from the close collaboration that marked the three countries' successful effort to block U.N. approval of the war.
"This was a French proposal," said a spokeswoman for France's U.N. ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, when asked if France had coordinated with the Russian and German delegations.
Fissures began appearing in the Russian-French-German alliance the moment the war began. French President Jacques Chirac insisted March 21 that France would block any U.N. resolution that would "give the American and British belligerents the right to administer Iraq." Berlin was far less bellicose, and German lawmakers held prayers for coalition solders in the German Bundesrat, or parliament. By the time Mr. Chirac met Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for an impromptu postwar summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 11-12, it was clear the antiwar alliance would find it difficult to hold together.
"I think this troika is already now history. I think it was actually history by the time the three got together in St. Pete," said Dmitri Trenin, foreign-affairs analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "I don't think Putin was terribly pleased with the St. Pete summit."
Steven Simon, a former U.S. National Security Council official and now an analyst at the Rand think tank in Washington, believes the nations backing peace were doomed from the start. "What's the underlying strategic nature of the Russian and French interests here?" he asks. "The Russians need a good relationship with the U.S. more than they need France; the Germans are deeply troubled by what's happened with the U.S. and will look for avenues to repair it... This was a tactical alliance, not a strategic one."
While Germany opposed war for reasons of pacifism and electoral politics, France was more concerned about constraining U.S. power, and Russia had significant economic interests to protect in Iraq.
There is $10 billion (€9.12 billion) of approved contracts sitting in the U.N.'s oil-for-food program for Iraq, a program that will be scrapped once sanctions are formally lifted. Many of those contracts belong to French and Russian companies. A U.N. spokesman declined to give a breakdown of contracts in the pipeline, but in 2002 Russian companies bought 124 million barrels of Iraqi oil for roughly $2.8 billion through the oil- for-food program, according to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. In 2001, French oil-for-food exports to Iraq reached €660 million under the program, according to the French Finance Ministry's foreign-trade arm.
The U.S. administration appears to be encouraging the divisions. Even while the war was under way, for example, and Russia's President Putin was taking as tough a line as Mr. Chirac, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice went to Moscow for talks aimed at rescuing the relationship. There were no such high-level visits to Paris.
More recently, France has followed Germany in making conciliatory gestures -- including a phone call from Mr. Chirac to U.S. President George W. Bush, in which the French leader promised to be "pragmatic" in dealing with Iraq's reconstruction. "Pragmatism" is the French government's new mantra in dealing with Iraq, after previously focusing on the principle of a multilateral global order. The shift in tone reflects pressure to repair relations with the U.S. from Mr. Chirac's own party and from the French business community, worried about the possible consequences.
"This pragmatism comes from not wanting to be locked into our previous position and from the need to recognize the new reality of the situation [in Iraq]," said one of Mr. Chirac's advisers Wednesday.
There may be political calculations behind the change too. In the run-up to the war, Mr. Chirac's tough stance as the leader of the peace camp won him high approval ratings in France. But with newspapers and television full of the U.S. victory in the past week, polls have shown that support is slipping, although it remains high. According to a poll this week by CSA, President Chirac's approval rating dropped 11 percentage points in April to 64% from 75% the previous month. (French polls don't publish margins of error.)
The response in Washington to the French charm offensive, however, has been cool. On Tuesday, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell answered "Yes" when asked during a television interview whether France would suffer as a result of its behavior over the war in Iraq. "We have to look at all aspects of our relationship with France in light of this," Mr. Powell said, according to a transcript of the interview on "The Charlie Rose Show," which was taped before Mr. de La Sabliere made his proposal at the U.N. |
