Editor’s note: Now that war has begun, The Daily Standard will be deviating from its normal schedule. For the next several days we’ll have morning and afternoon editions posted regularly and other reports posted throughout the day, so you’ll want to check back with us often.
With Matt Labash and Stephen F. Hayes on the ground in the Middle East, Christopher Caldwell in Europe, and Fred Barnes, William Kristol, David Brooks, and the rest of the team in Washington, The Daily Standard will have some of the best reporting and analysis around. Stay tuned.
–JVL
Paris
THE QUESTION of whether France has gone too far, first asked last week on the cover of the newsweekly Le Point, is now being asked in the New York Times, whose own position on the war is not so far from France’s. It is an impossible question to answer. France cannot decide whether it has gone too far until it decides how far it wants to go. Today French president Jacques Chirac finds himself in the position of a driver lost on a highway in a rainstorm, uncertain whether his exit is 10 miles ahead or 10 miles back.
Even as military operations began last night, Chirac was sending contradictory messages. On one hand, he and his advisers show signs of beginning the long march back to good relations with the United States. Chirac himself tried to do this even before President Bush’s ultimatum to Saddam Hussein by hinting that France might authorize war if Saddam could be given another thirty days. On Tuesday, Jean-David Levitte, France’s ambassador to the United States, stated–and Chirac himself reiterated–that France would consider entering the war on the side of the Anglo-American alliance should Saddam use chemical or biological weapons.
On the other hand, France also shows signs that it has not yet begun to obstruct. In a characteristically grandiloquent speech to the U.N. security counsel Wednesday afternoon, foreign minister Dominique de Villepin sought to make a coherent case for France’s position. According to Villepin, “only the United Nations has the legal and moral authority” to rebuild Iraq and oversee the country’s economic reconstruction. More generally, Villepin seemed to be urging a U.N. monopoly on regulating all international conflict. He suggested setting up, presumably as an alternative to American policing, “an innovative, permanent structure, a disarmament body under the aegis of the United Nations.” One of the first tasks of a revivified U.N., Villepin promised, would be to intervene aggressively in the Israel-Palestine conflict–to “force the doors of peace” was the way he put it. The speech was a mistake. Many Americans would like to believe that France’s moves in recent weeks have been a matter of forgivable pique. And here was de Villepin gussying them up as a doctrine.
In a highly recommended interview in Wednesday’s Figaro, the Italian geopolitical thinker Lucio Caracciolo gave a lucid account of shifting geopolitical relations between Europe and the United States. “Internationally,” said Caracciolo, “France has become almost the counterweight to the United States, but that position is untenable in the long run. One thing is certain: Underneath the diplomatic niceties, the relationship between France, Germany, the rest of Europe and the United States will be marked by this crisis for a long time. If the Americans win the war quickly and well, they will exact revenge.”
Caracciolo’s point is rather starkly put. But it’s good that Le Figaro published his words, since the French are almost totally unaware of the gravity of the split their government has provoked. By now, all of them have heard (and rightly resent) Americans’ ignorant talk of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and the equally moronic efforts of Ohio congressman Robert Ney to degallicize French toast and French fries. But the French tend to view these outbursts as mere political theater with no underlying reality.
There is evidence that the French do not realize the gravity of the Iraq situation even now. On Wednesday night, as most European stations were dwelling on war-related news, the French ones seemed preoccupied with other things. France 2, which is supposed to be the country’s big news network, was airing a jibber-jabber show that asked, Oprah-style, “Can small faults have big consequences?” France 3 had the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva on. She was talking about changing our “mentalités” towards handicapped people, one of whom sat twitching alongside of her, stammering out allusions to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. (I am not so heartless as to make this up.)
There is evidence that France’s governing class is similarly disengaged, at least from the American perception of the situation. On Tuesday, Le Monde published a collection of unattributed quotes from high-ranking Chirac advisers to the effect that “the U.N. could emerge from the Iraqi crisis stronger than ever.”
Wednesday night I had dinner with a mid-level domestic policymaker in the UMP, the umbrella party of the right that Chirac launched in the wake of last May’s elections. When I raised the U.S.-France split, he replied, “Luckily, it’s bound to be a short war.” His obvious assumption was that this little diplomatic perturbation would pass with the occasion that gave rise to it. He has not reckoned in the slightest with the possibility that, in wartime, America–however fond its “feelings” towards France–might deem it dangerous not to punish an ally that has actively worked against its interests. Whether France wants to repair its relationship with the United States now or later remains murky. But it is clear that France has given too little thought to the possibility that America might have other plans.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
