FAREWELL, FRANCE
By RALPH PETERS
April 11, 2003 -- AS the Baghdad regime's officials fled, leaving behind terrorists and thugs as a rear guard, a trio of Saddam's dismayed defenders met in Moscow. French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin - the axis of non-nein-nyet - discussed their powerlessness to save a favored dictator.
Ah, could we but overhear the curses those three hurled our way in their anger and their impotence.
But don't expect this trio to continue to sing in harmony. Resembling the Arab street in their determination to blame the United States for home-made ills, Chirac and Schroeder have no meaningful futures. Putin is another sort entirely, colder and more wary of empty gestures.
We will find ways to work with Moscow, although our mutual embrace will not be particularly warm. Putin is clever enough to know a losing hand when events have forced one upon him. He would like to restrain the United States, but he will never sacrifice his country's interests to those of France or Germany.
Gerhard Schroeder doesn't even matter. The only politician in the West who can make Bill Clinton seem a model of integrity and courage, the German chancellor leads a feckless nation of moral incompetents. We will mend our outward relationship with Berlin, but, on the level that matters, we've said auf Wiedersehen to Lili Marlene.
The farewell was overdue.
Our troops will leave Germany across the coming decade, as the German welfare state continues to fare less and less well. We will continue to trade goods, but will never again trade diplomatic intimacies. We will shake hands in public, but our private relationship has been permanently shaken.
This is a positive development, further liberating the United States from its thrall to continental Europe. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was exactly right to dismiss "Old Europe" as much diminished in relevance. When next the Germans and French tug at the sleeves of our policymakers, we are likely to brush them off - not without a measure of satisfaction.
The changed relationship with France matters most. Chirac, abetted by his sorcerer's apprentice, Foreign Minister Dominque de Villepin, has done his country's status nothing but harm through "l'affaire Iraq." Grotesquely overestimating France's influence and authority, Chirac garnered an empty round of applause with his self-adoring performance in support of a heinous dictator.
But the end effect was to bring Charles de Gaulle's inflated legacy to a sputtering end. Since the close of the Second World War, France had been permitted a louder voice than its stature merited. That era is over, murdered by Chirac. While calling President Bush a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy, Chirac shot his own country in the back.
France defied the United States, not wisely but too well. Chirac's foreign minister went out of his way to humiliate Colin Powell, the Bush Cabinet's most congenial member from a European perspective. But the astonishing thing is that Chirac genuinely seems to have believed that France could force a bit into Washington's mouth, then jerk the reins.
Well, France fell off the horse before the race got underway.
There will be handshakes with Paris, too, and hollow hugs and kisses. But France will never again be allowed even the illusion of a voice in shaping American policy. Chirac has thrown away the last rags of influence France could wear to the diplomatic ball.
Consider the situation in which France has been left by this very expensive outburst of Gallic vanity:
* France's lack of influence has been revealed to a humiliating degree.
* France has an aging population, a troubled economy and a hamstrung government paralyzed by a culture of entitlement. It is creaking toward irrelevance, while the United States surges ahead.
* France's shrunken military is closer in organization and capabilities to a World War II force than to America's armed forces; the French cannot even manage civil strife in Ivory Coast.
* France's elite - a fake aristocracy of bourgeois intellectuals - has no vision for the future, only a crippling nostalgia for the past.
* France has the most ferociously racist society in Europe - with rapidly expanding Arab and ethnic African populations unable to integrate. The coming explosions will make America's race riots of the 1960s look like a series of cotillions.
Still, fairness is an American, if not a French, trait. After all the wartime jokes have been told, the truth is that the French people are not to blame for the current state of affairs. They're really OK - honest - and they do cook damnably well.
The problem lies in the government bureaucracy and its supporting cadre of Parisian intellectuals. France is far from a meritocracy in the American vein. Rather, the ruling and chattering classes in France are inbred even by European standards. They go to the same small number of schools and universities, cherish the same tenured, state-funded positions, and live in the same Parisian neighborhoods. And they hate with far greater facility than they create.
These are the small men and women who cannot bear France's diminished role in the world, who lash out at America for championing the average citizen's right to opportunity (egalité - equality - only goes so far on the Left Bank), and who dream loftily of changing the world when they cannot even change the political prejudices they have held for half a century.
Now they and their champions, Chirac and de Villepin, have gotten a brutal comeuppance. France has lost authority, credibility and influence in 2003 almost as swiftly as the French lost their country in 1940. The paradox is that, in the long term, this humiliation of the Parisian elite may be a good thing for the common people of France despised by the ruling class.
In the meantime, "Au revoir, chere Marianne. Hope you didn't catch a chill in Moscow."
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer who still is not convinced that Alsace should be part of France, or that Bavaria should be part of Germany.
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