Why We Singled Out France
(written by Lancelot Finn, April 2003)
Three European powers, France, Germany and Russia, are meeting in St. Petersburg this weekend to plot against the coalition victory and undermine the freedom of the Iraqi people. Two of them should be forgiven. One should not.
The goal of the meeting, at least in some minds, is to assure that the UN is in full control of the reconstruction of Iraq, even though UN institutions attempted to thwart the liberation of Iraq, and a lonely coalition of the US and the UK, with token support from some others, had to risks its soldiers’ lives as well as to take the political risks.
In view of the rapid development of events on the ground, the suggestion that urgent tasks should be gratuitously bogged down in the cumbersome bureaucracy of the UN is irresponsible. It is now clear that the war was a genuine liberation, indeed it is turning out to be more like a revolution. Revolutions can lead to great good, but they are also mercurial and dangerous. The coalition forces have stepped into a whirlwind, and they alone are in a position to ride it. They have shown their courage and their skill in battle, but now they face a multitude of new tasks, and we can only hope that they show great adaptability in this crisis.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan might have been expected to appreciate the plan to hand Iraq over to the UN. With the UN humiliated by the coalition’s decision to take action without it, a mandate to run post-war Iraq might be thought to assuage his pride. But he resisted the temptation. He has shown himself a truly humane individual by declining the invitation to St. Petersburg, and instead offering the idea of a “coalition-plus” plan, whereby the UN would assist the coalition in Iraq but would leave them the main role. He has placed the welfare of the Iraqi people ahead of his pride. Hopefully the Bush administration will accept the “coalition-plus” plan, even if may prove little more than political cover for both the coalition and the UN.
Not so France, Germany and Russia. One might have hoped that the inspiring scenes of celebration in Basra and Baghdad would have made Schroeder and Chirac repent of their opposition to what has proven to be a true liberation. One might have hoped that the ominous scenes of the breakdown of order as people took vengeance on Saddam’s regime would inspire sympathy and support for the coalition forces in the subtle, difficult, and crucial task which has fallen to them. Instead of participating in the glory of liberation, they want to spoil it out of envy of the superpower. How can the US hope to restore its alliances in Europe when its leaders continue to behave like this?
Well, all is not lost. I think at least two of these estranged allies are worth restoring relations with.
First, Germany. Germany has been a very loyal ally of the US ever since World War II. “War guilt” has left a deep mark on the national consciousness, and has prevented Germans from embarking on an independent foreign policy, out of a sort of fear of themselves. Schroeder was the firm German chancellor to come from a generation that grew up after the war and felt no lingering “war guilt.” In recent years, Germans have deployed troops abroad, in Kosovo, for the first time since World War II. The war in Iraq was unpopular, because Germans have a deep fear of wars of conquest, and they value international structures like the UN, which allow their neighbors not to fear them, and hold at bay the nightmares of their own past. So Germans were exhilarated to see Schroeder stand up to the US, the most independent-minded stand a German leader has taken since World War II, in a cause that, through the lens of their own particular history, seemed to be just. German motives, in short, were good, even if their position turned out to be mistaken.
Schroeder’s stand against the US helped bring him to victory despite an unsuccessful first term. Today, with the German economy sinking yet further, Schroeder has become deeply unpopular. His opponent, Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats, supported the war in Iraq, in part because she is an Ossi, an East German, and therefore appreciates the value of being liberated from totalitarianism. The liberation of Iraq should now give her a boost. With Germany, America should forgive and forget. Germany is an ally worth having—responsible, trustworthy, large, with 82m people, and though its military is not strong it has the world’s third-largest economy. With expansion complete, Germany will become the heart of the new Europe.
Russia’s staunch opposition to the war is particularly disappointing because only a few months ago Bush and Putin seemed to have been reaching a sort of entente. The Russians, who have their own fears of Islamic terrorism, were very impressed by 9/11, and allowed America to put soldiers in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—previously their coveted “near abroad”—in order to fight in Afghanistan. That the entente has declined so quickly to the point where Russia seemed likely to veto a UN resolution is sad.
However, the Russians deserve a degree of understanding. Iraq was an ally going back to Soviet times, so the fall of Saddam is in part a blow to Russian pride. And Russian pride has taken all too many blows in recent years: the loss of the struggle between capitalism and communism, the loss of the external empire of satellites in Eastern Europe, the loss of the internal empire of the Soviet Union, which left millions of Russians stranded abroad, the unraveling of the economy. The Russians can be forgiven, too, for being unenthused about the spread of democracy, and markets, under Western tutelage, for their experience of the transition to democratic capitalism has been a very bitter one. And when they witness a veritable revolution on the streets of Baghdad, it inspires chilling memories of their own revolution.
They have the largest land area in the world and large oil reserves. They are a nuclear power. For historical reasons, they are held in great suspicion by all their neighbors, but to integrate Russia into a system of Western alliances would be a good way to solve this. Large Russian minorities abroad give them a reserve of potential influence. Russia may seem weak now, but as Talleyrand said, “Russia is never as strong as it looks, Russia is never as weak as it looks.” Russia has always been unprincipled and cynical in its foreign policy. A move as cynical as trying to use the UN to undermine the liberation of Iraq has plenty of precedent in Russian history. But in the last analysis, in the greatest crises, the Russians have been on the right side (against Napoleon, against Hitler) and have proven capable of colossal sacrifices, which have been just as critical to the preservation of liberty as have been the efforts of Britain and America. Russia, like Germany, is an ally worth having. Washington should find ways to assuage Russian pride and restore the entente that Bush and Putin were developing.
And then, there is France.
The defining moment in France’s history, deeply etched into their national identity, is the fall of the Bastille, the French Revolution. Today a Bastille is falling again. The French should be the first to cheer as the Iraqis bring down the statues of Saddam. They should praise the coalition forces who were Iraq’s liberators. Instead, their obsessive jealousy of American power has made them determined to stay in stubborn, misanthropic opposition.