Jacques Chirac's Iraq Agenda
by Amir Taheri
Wall Street Journal Europe
April 4, 2003

Last April, when he regained control of France's foreign policy after a five-year "cohabitation" with a Socialist prime minister, Jacques Chirac quickly fixed the priorities of his new five-year presidential term. According to officials involved with the plan, top of the list was the rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

The plan, the sources revealed, was to be implemented in two parts. The first part consisted of efforts to prevent the passage of a Security Council resolution that would provide a legal basis for toppling Saddam Hussein by force.

"If you ask me what will happen next I can tell you there will be no war," a senior official said on condition of anonymity last October. President Chirac has taken personal charge of the Iraqi dossier with the clear aim of preventing an unnecessary war that could in his view destabilize the whole of the Middle East.

The second part of the plan focused on persuading Saddam to make changes in his domestic and foreign policies to get sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations lifted within a year or two.

Apparent Victory

Last June, Mr. Chirac sent a civil servant as an unofficial emissary to Baghdad to renew contact. A month later the French Embassy in Baghdad was back in full operation for the first time in 12 years. In September, France became the main participant in the Baghdad International Fair. Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, who visited the French pavilion at the fair, told reporters that he looked forward to a visit to Paris.

Until last month it seemed that Mr. Chirac had scored a major victory in the first phase of his plan. The U.S. had been duped by an ambiguous Resolution 1441 and seemed hooked to endless diplomatic maneuvers in the Security Council while anti-American sentiments, partly encouraged by Mr. Chirac and his accidental partner, Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, continued to rise in much of Europe.

Mr. Chirac's opposition to any action against Saddam was based on a false assumption: the Bush administration would not dare go to war without the express authority of the Security Council. The French leader was convinced that he could drag on "the political process" around a "second" resolution well into the summer in the hope that the heat and dust of the region would render war impossible.

Mr. Chirac engaged in a diplomatic version of a Dutch auction. He began by asking for open-ended "weapons inspections" with reports and "assessment of Iraq's performance" every four months.

When the Americans laughed down that suggestion, Mr. Chirac offered a discount by asking for a four-month extension of the inspections. When that, too, failed to impress Washington, he offered another discount, this time asking for just 30 days.

By Feb. 7, however, U.S. President George W. Bush had made his mind to go to war and refused to take Mr. Chirac's latest call to the White House.

Mr. Chirac had overplayed a weak hand. Neither he nor his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, had ever said categorically that France would veto a new resolution. (They always said their answer would be no "at this moment," or "today.") At the same time, however, Messrs. Chirac and de Villepin were not content with just opposing the Anglo-American position. They worked hard to organize opposition to it. Mr. de Villepin visited 14 capitals, including three in Africa, to press for a "non" to any attempt to use force against Saddam. Mr. Chirac telephoned more than a dozen heads of state in pursuit of the same goal.

Messrs. Chirac and Villepin eventually fell victim to the ambiguity they had cultivated for months. Mr. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair took the French "non" of the moment as a definite threat of veto and decided to go to war without a second, in fact an 18th, resolution.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Today, Mr. Chirac sees himself abandoned even by Mr. Schroeder, who has just announced that Germany, too, favors regime change in Baghdad.

Is the French leader's behavior, seen as "bizarre" even by some of his political allies, including former Industry Minister Alain Madelin, motivated by a friendship with Saddam, dating back to 1975?

A documentary broadcast by FR3 television in Paris last month narrated the 30-year old Chirac-Saddam personal friendship. But it also missed the point: Mr. Chirac sought Saddam's friendship not out of personal empathy but in the framework of a political vision.

That vision is part of the legacy left by the late General Charles De Gaulle who believed that France should counterbalance the German weight in Europe, and the Anglo-American axis across the Atlantic, with a Mediterranean "profondeur" which, in practice, means a special relationship with the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East.

Mr. Chirac's tactics during the Iraq crisis at the United Nations made him something of a hero for the Ba'athist ruling elite in Baghdad. The newspaper Babel, owned by Saddam's son Uday, gave Mr. Chirac the coveted title of "Great Combatant" (Al-Munadhil al-Akbar). Mr. Chirac also received an enthusiastic reception from crowds in Algiers during a state visit in March. Abdallah Jaballah, the Algerian fundamentalist leader, praised Mr. Chirac as "the only truly Arab leader today."

Most Arab leaders, however, express surprise at Mr. Chirac's decision to wreck relations with Washington in a forlorn attempt to save Saddam. Last March when Mr. Chirac asked Arab leaders to endorse his position during their summit in Sharm al-Sheikh, he was politely ignored.

"We cannot understand Chirac," says a senior Egyptian official. "It is a mystery why he wanted to save Saddam when that meant wrecking relations with Washington and London."

It is not just the relations with Washington and London that have been "wrecked," at least temporarily. Mr. Chirac has divided the European Union, damaged NATO, and, perhaps, given the Security Council the coup de grace. He has insulted the East Europeans who dared express support for the U.S., and antagonized the Turks by trying to block defense assistance to them through NATO.

There is more: Mr. Chirac has involved France in a controversial $4 billion loan deal for Lebanon, the world's most indebted nation in relation to its economy, landed French troops in the midst of a civil war in the Ivory Coast with no sure allies, provoked a tribal conflict in the Central African Republic, and hooked French policy to Yasser Arafat's moribund leadership in the West Bank and Gaza.

Add to that Mr. Chirac's quarrels with Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar, over various issues, and the full extent of the wreckage caused in France's foreign relations becomes clearer.

How did Mr. Chirac, a man who was in government when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, work himself into such a tight corner? Some of his friends blame it all on Mr. de Villepin, an amateur poet who tends to get carried away when delivering his flowery speeches.

Mr. Chirac earned his nickname of "le bulldozer" when he was minister of agriculture in 1969 for his rough tactics when negotiating European fish quotas and farm subsidies. His friends say he is only encouraged on his confrontational course by Mr. de Villepin.

"When a bulldozer is driven by a poet the result is bound to be catastrophic," says one of Chirac's political friends. "Mr. Chirac is always excited and needs someone to calm him down. In Mr. de Villepin, however, we have someone even more excited. With these two France is going to quarrel with a lot more people in the next four years."

That individuals could have such a devastating effect on French foreign policy is a direct result of what one could describe as a deficit of democracy in France. Under the existing De Gaulle-written constitution, foreign policy is the preserve of the president, who need not consult anybody about whatever he may be doing at any given time.

Sumo Wrestling

In recent months all Western democracies have conducted parliamentary debates on the issue of Iraq, in most cases voting on the subject. France, has remained the exception, giving the president carte blanche. Even the cabinet was not asked to discuss the issue at any length. Because the French media rarely question the president's foreign policy options, the public seldom gets a chance to develop an informed opinion on issues.

Mr. Chirac is a fan of the Japanese-style wrestling, Sumo. But when it comes to foreign policy he seems to ignore one key Sumo lesson: never to get too close to the rim of the ring where one risks being thrown out.

The president often boasts about his "certain experience" and his "profound political sense." But he seems to have forgotten that politics is about choosing between friend and enemy, just as ethics is about the choice between good and evil, and aesthetics about the choice between the beautiful and the ugly.

The tactics that could win an agriculture minister kudos when fighting over fish quotas are not suitable when it comes to deciding the future of so vital a region as the Middle East.

Liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's evil tyranny is a noble cause. History might remember Mr. Chirac as the man who prevented France from playing its part in it.

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