UNDER THE ADAGE “save us from our friends,” France’s president Jacques Chirac has added to his long list of reasons for opposing a U.S.-led campaign to disarm Iraq the desire to “protect” Americans from fighting “angry Muslims.” According to a French Defense Ministry official quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Chirac “tells his generals that the Americans don’t understand what they’re getting into, . . . that they don’t understand what it is like to fight angry Muslims.” Chirac should know. He was dispatched to Algeria in 1955 for a 13-month stint commanding a French platoon fighting “angry Muslims” during France’s losing war to maintain control of Algeria.
Chirac and France have reason to be concerned about Muslim rage. But it is against France, and not America, that 23 million Iraqis will direct their anger if Chirac continues to stand in the way of their liberation. When history holds a mirror up to America’s good faith efforts to release Iraq’s people from Saddam’s tyranny and begin transforming the Middle East into a region of greater freedom and prosperity, the contrast will be stark with Chirac’s efforts to protect Saddam at all costs.
Those efforts are consistent with France’s ignoble colonial record in the Middle East. The French began angering Muslims over 180 years ago, when an insult to the French consul in Algeria by the bey of Algiers in 1827 led to a military occupation of the country three years later. Using Napoleon’s 1808 contingency plan for the invasion of Algeria, 34,000 French soldiers landed west of Algiers and looted, raped, and pillaged their way into the city, desecrating mosques and destroying cemeteries along their route. It was an inauspicious beginning to France’s self-described “civilizing mission,” whose character, according to the “U.S. Library of Congress Country Study on Algeria” was “cynical, arrogant and cruel.”
After Charles X was deposed in 1830, his cousin Louis Philippe, the “citizen king,” was named to preside over a constitutional monarchy. Louis Philippe concluded that although French policy in Algeria had failed, the occupation should continue for the sake of national prestige. French colons, or more popularly pied noirs (literally, black feet), poured into Algeria, seizing lands, particularly those belonging to Berber and Arab tribes, religious foundations, and villages and destroying Algeria’s traditional society. This legacy is part of the background to the enormous hardships and challenges Algeria, ravaged by a bloody Islamic civil war, faces even today.
And France had other colonial adventures in the Middle East. In 1916, as it battled on the Western Front against Germany during World War I, France planned for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire between it and Great Britain pursuant to a then-secret treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Under this agreement, France gobbled up what is now Syria, Lebanon, and North Africa from Casablanca to Tunis. Britain inherited Cyprus, present day Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and most of the oil riches of the Arabian Peninsula. The French allowed Gallic pride to get in the way of pecuniary interests. Not one of the “blue areas” allocated to France gave the French access to the Middle East’s oil wealth–Britain was too shrewd for that. And French policymakers have been trying to rectify this self-inflicted “historical imbalance” ever since.
Following World War II, the French were pushed out of one colony after another. They first exiled the king of Morocco, then were forced to reinstate him and grant Morocco independence in 1956. The same for Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria. Yet, they stubbornly held onto their prized possession, Algeria, until 1962. That year, in the hope of averting an all-out civil war in France over Algeria’s future, Charles de Gaulle, President Chirac’s hero, brought French troops home following a debilitating battle against hundreds of thousands of well-armed “angry Muslim” guerrillas.
Despite this inglorious history, France has not given up attempting to assert itself in the Levant–with Iraq serving as its primary target of opportunity. After the 1967 war, France abandoned Israel as a strategic ally, and relations with Iraq became central to its Middle East policy.
When Jacques Chirac became one of France’s youngest prime ministers in 1974, his contemporary, Saddam Hussein, seemed an enlightened, secular leader. Saddam, after all, had quelled his own “angry Muslims.” Soon after being named prime minister, Chirac made his first visit to Baghdad, and Saddam reciprocated with a rare trip to the West. The two men basked in each other’s diplomatic debuts, according to press reports, and together they sealed a Franco-Iraqi marriage.
Soon, Iraqi oil was flowing to France, and France was turning Iraq into its largest regional purchaser of arms. Dassault fighter bombers, Matra missiles, and Thomson electronic devices poured into Baghdad. For French firms, Iraq represented a bonanza. France even sold Iraq its first nuclear reactor–the Osirak reactor the Israelis destroyed in a bombing raid in 1982, a raid much criticized by France, but in retrospect a great service to the world. It is not by accident that Chirac has a special place in his heart for Saddam, given how Saddam helped him make his mark among French technocrats and industrialists.
Ironically, France’s coddling of Saddam during Iraq’s bloody war with Iran led to a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks in Paris, which were later proven to be a direct result of French military support for Iraq. How quickly Chirac appears to have forgotten what it means to suffer terrorism on one’s own soil.
Today, as tempers flare between the Elysée and the White House, officials in Paris have blithely asserted that a war against Iraq is really a war for oil–that is, to quench America’s oil thirst. Here, too, however, Paris may have ulterior motives for wanting to keep the Yankees out of Baghdad.
Jacques Chirac in particular may be trying to rectify the injustice of the Sykes-Picot Anglo oil grab. Perhaps the French assume that as long as Saddam is in power they will have their own gas station in the Middle East. Indeed, in informed circles it is widely asserted that French oil companies have secretly negotiated huge oil concessions with Saddam should sanctions against Iraq be lifted. Estimates suggest that the giant TotalFinaElf consortium will have development rights to roughly 25 percent of total Iraqi reserves (believed to be the second largest in the world), worth perhaps over $50 billion in exploration concessions.
Certainly, Chirac must be calculating what will happen if he is on the losing side of Washington’s Iraq policy and Saddam is overthrown. It may cost France’s oil companies dearly. What’s more, when America helps liberate the Iraqis from Saddam’s horrific rule, they will not soon forget that France, the country of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” stood in freedom’s way in order to preserve the Chirac-Saddam marriage. Then France may once again have millions of “angry Muslims” to contend with.
Marc Ginsberg served as U.S. ambassador to Morocco from 1994 to 1998.
