French Actions misunderstood by many in the US

By Marsha Johnston in Paris

President Chirac's position on Iraq should have been anticipated

France's threat to veto a second United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to disarm Iraq has led to a rising tide of recrimination and feelings of French betrayal. Yet many US and British politicians have failed to recognize that France's position was entirely predictable in the light of both French public opinion and past decades of the French foreign policy.

A flurry of attacks on France have come from a variety of quarters in recent weeks. The US Congress has renamed french fries freedom fries. US senator John McCain (R-Arizona) invoked the specter of former President de Gaulle in a recent television interview, implying that Jacques Chirac is little more than a reincarnation of his pig-headed, anti-American predecessor.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet colleagues have repeatedly stated that they hold France responsible for the inability to win majority support for a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing war against Iraq. In the eyes of many within the Bush administration, France's stance is motivated largely by a burning desire to thwart the US whenever possible, as well as by some largely undefined commercial ambitions in Iraq. Yet French President Jacques Chirac's decision to take the lead in opposing an early war on Iraq was a predictable expression of French post-Cold War foreign policy which should have been anticipated by even a casual student of international affairs.

"This opposition to a war in the Gulf is not an expression of support, even indirectly, for the Iraqi regime," says Barthelemy Courmont, a researcher at Paris' Institute for International and Strategic Relations. "The real opposition is to the concept of a preemptive strike (on Iraq) and to giving too much power to any single UN Security Council member."

Experts in French foreign affairs note that the UN is the centerpiece of France's foreign policy post Cold War. "France has accepted the need for a multilateral approach to international relations," writes Alex Macleod, director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Policy and Security at Canada's University of Quebec. "Such an approach involves acting through institutions...to formulate policies and common behaviors which express in some way the collective will of the members, and which are binding on them."

The Chirac government and more than 80% of the French electorate months ago adopted the viewpoint that United Nations resolution 1441 left it up to the UN weapons inspectors to inform the Security Council whether the inspections were achieving the disarmament of Iraq.

Given the series of equivocal and sometimes encouraging reports delivered by Dr. Hans Blix and his team of inspectors, French officials saw no reason to press for or agree to any early use of force. Nor would the vast majority of the French electorate sanction any invasion of Iraq.

So, if France was sincere about disarming Iraq via the UN, why did it threaten to veto a second resolution advocating the use of military force? Because Chirac and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin believed that UN weapons inspectors were making significant progress. "In French eyes, Iraq is far less dangerous today than it was in the 1980s," says Guillaume Parmentier, a French foreign affairs analyst and author of Reconcilable Differences: U.S.-French Relations in the New Era.

Some French government officials believe that a US-lead war on Iraq poses a greater threat to stability in the Middle East than anything Saddam Hussein does. Attacking Iraq while ignoring rogue states like North Korea and failing to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will, in their eyes, reinforce the belief held by many in the Muslim world that the West is bent on an anti-Islamic crusade of world domination.

With stronger cultural and commercial ties to the Arab world and a significant Muslim population of its own, France sees prudence as the best way to prevent a return to a fundamentalist terrorist attacks which plagued Paris as recently 1995-96. Parmentier and other analysts reject the accusation that France has acted mainly to protect her Middle East oil interests as "totally ridiculous. If we were pursuing our own commercial interests, we would have simply followed the US into the war." Working against US interests in Iraq, he stresses, would be the quickest way to lose oil concessions in any post-Saddam Iraqi government sponsored by the Bush administration.