News analysis: Chirac's casual 'no'
John Vinocur/IHT International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
French leader plays down consequences
PARIS On one hand, there was the French president telling his country, with a strong dose of diplomatic disingenuousness, that a French break with the United States would mean little to trans-Atlantic or French-American relations, and hardly deepen the European fractures that have traumatized its hopes for a unified future.
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On the other, there was Jacques Chirac's calm, almost pleasurable explanation Monday night on national television of France's intent to use its United Nations veto against an American-led war on Saddam Hussein.
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The reposed manner and Chiracquian bonhommie looked authentic. But the president's assertion that a French veto of an American Security Council resolution enabling the United States to strike the Iraqi dictator "is not an exceptional phenomenon," indeed that "it's in the nature of things," seemed at a vast distance from reality. And it magnified Chirac's attempt to avoid discussion of France's particular responsibility in a process that has brought grave risk to both the integrity of the UN and NATO.
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"I know the Americans too well to imagine they could use such methods," Chirac said, brushing off a French journalist's question about whether there would be a price to pay for France's stance. And more: "I'm perhaps one of the people who know best how (Europe) functions" he claimed, and said, "it won't be divided when the crisis is over" - this in reply to another interviewer's observation that brutal new internal disputes over who holds power in the European Union had shaken it since the Iraq dispute began.
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The two television news presenters facing Chirac spared him any direct questions about a possible implosion of the Security Council's role as a result of a French veto, or about recent French obstruction at NATO on supplying defensive material to Turkey against a vast majority of its membership, or what France's attitude would be if allied troops fighting Saddam were felled by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons.
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But Chirac's effort at turning a Western institutional confrontation of proportions unknown since de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of NATO in the 1960s into a disagreement among friends went as far as insisting that after Saddam's defeat "France, very obviously, will have its place" as an invited participant in Iraq's reconstruction.
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If this was wishful thinking, it showed no regard for the State Department's assertions that a veto was "unfriendly" and would have unspecified serious consequences. If it was an attempt to smooth away an international perception that France was embarked on a single-minded campaign to thwart the United States on the tactically favorable terrain of the Security Council, then it did not sway a commentator like Henry Kissinger, who told French television, just after Chirac spoke, that he could not understand how an ally had created agitation throughout the world against America at a "vital period" for the United States.
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Simply, Chirac seemed to be telling the French the country could continue on its present policy line at odds with the United States at no cost.
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Both in the interest of diplomacy and perhaps in the nearly extinct hope of a French change of heart before a vote on the resolution, President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have spoken - each once - of France's remaining a friend and ally.
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Still, there were other responses from outside France, none minimizing, in Chirac's manner, the gravity of the circumstances. Tony Blair talked Tuesday about the dangerousness of a veto that would result in "dividing America from Europe." Friedbert Pflueger, the Christian Democrat foreign policy spokesman in the German Bundestag, said a veto would be part of a process splitting Europe apart and making it irrelevant. Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, he said, "could already count three victims: NATO, the UN, and a common European foreign policy."
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In France, where publicly objecting to a veto has become a near-subversive activity, there was quasi-general support for Chirac's willingness to confront America on what he insisted is an issue of principle rather than one of geopolitical calculation.
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Perhaps curiously, alongside approval for the threat of a veto, there was a lot less willingness to go along with Chirac's don't-worry-be-happy description of the aftermath of France turning against the United States
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This was a step, according to a French parliamentarian, that was likened on Feb. 26 by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to firing a bullet in the Americans' back. One of Chirac's interviewers made reference to the phrase on Monday night, but the president did not respond directly.
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The notion was not exactly on message.
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To the contrary, drive-time commuters listening to commentary Tuesday morning on RTL, the radio station with the country's biggest audience, were told that the Chirac's approach presented enormous risks, would change France's relations with its allies, and, concerning the Americans, had elements that went beyond crisis into the realm of psychodrama and a possible divorce.
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In fact, Francois Bayrou, president of the UDF, a centrist party making up part of Chirac's National Assembly majority, scoffed at Chirac's idea that the European Union would emerge serenely and remorsefully from France and Germany's dispute with a majority of member countries and candidates on supporting an American strike on Iraq.
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"I absolutely disagree," he said. "I think the EU is in deep crisis. And you're naturally in a more fragile situation afterwards than before you started."
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Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, the former Danish foreign minister, chastised Chirac and Schroeder last week for failing to understand that the breakdown in the EU and NATO effectively reduced pressure on Saddam and raised the probability of war. He likened Chirac to King Lear, saying that the loss of its European primacy left France, "in the face of diminishing influence, alone with its impotent rage."
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By contrast, the padded edges of Chirac's approach challenged credibility with less frankness and a more muffled type of excess.
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What of the 200,000 U.S. soldiers already in place in the Gulf, Chirac asked rhetorically during his 40 television minutes Monday night.
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"But they've already won!" the president said. "I told that to President Bush not very long ago. It's highly probable if the Americans and the British hadn't deployed these large forces, Iraq would not have produced this more active cooperation that the inspectors demanded and are now getting. So, in reality, you can say that in so far as their strategy for disarming Iraq goes, the Americans have already reached their objective. They've won."
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