Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Vino in the Bootleg

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Mr roT said...

Politicus
John Vinocur


When Jacques Chirac leaves office in May, he hopes to take with him into history the notion of having made France the most active international opponent of the American march into Iraq.

At a distance of four years, and with the United States' grief as a measure, Chirac and his grandiloquent prime minister and former foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who will leave office with him, have been working hard at chiseling memorials to their Iraq positions.

This is an easier job here than finding reverent recollections of how they ran France. These days, deep in a recriminatory presidential election campaign, the French are called on daily by nearly a dozen candidates to lift the country from what they insist is its decline and neglect.

Villepin, who wanted to succeed Chirac but ran aground as a clumsy domestic political manager, nonetheless felt qualified recently to issue a timetable for how the Americans should get out of Iraq. Chirac sat down and talked extensively to a writer for a valedictory book.

But in trying to transmute the fog of the runup to the war into glory, the book may provide more clarity than intended: "L'Inconnu de l'Élysée," the country's top nonfiction best seller, while idealizing Chirac's role, brings unexpected new support to a thesis that France's government was not so much struggling to save humanity as looking out for Numéro Un.

It credits the idea that France maneuvered for months while considering whether to participate in an American-led invasion of Iraq. And it suggests that Villepin, after summoning the United Nations Security Council to rise in opposition against America, actually thought that France could not sustain its position and would "link up with the United States" before the war began in March 2003.

Its author, Pierre Péan, seems to be trying hard to establish that the president - not Villepin, as some say - was the motor of the French position on Iraq. All those around Chirac, Péan intimates, were not the convinced crusaders they might have seemed.

In stressing this theme, Péan cites, without challenge or elaboration, research by Henri Vernet, a French journalist, and by James Rubin, a U.S. assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Bill Clinton.

Parts of their individual reporting - concerning a French general's dispatch to Washington in December 2002 to explore a joint invasion plan (four months after Germany told the United States it would not join the war), or French conversations with the Bush administration about a method to accept an American justification for it - obviously contradict the consecrated vision of the French role.

Writing in 2004, Vernet told of General Jean-Patrick Gaviard's "offer of services" to the Americans, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 troops in total, if the UN gave its green light to an intervention.

Péan's book points further to a 2003 article by Rubin that tells of Villepin assuring the Americans that, under certain circumstances, France would participate in the military coalition even if Russia and China vetoed the war's authorization.

(Separately, but not mentioned by Péan, Rubin describes a France that later in February, after forming an opposition front with Germany and Russia, was "suddenly scrambling to avoid a showdown with the United States." According to Rubin, the French, in high-level communications, advised "the Americans to bypass the Security Council entirely. 'Your interpretation [of Resolution 1441] is sufficient [to justify war],' they counseled Washington, and 'you should rely on your interpretation.'")

By Péan's own account, French intelligence services actually "agreed in part with the American analysis on Iraq's will to acquire a nuclear weapon" but had no proof.

Péan goes on to directly assert Villepin's "wavering," singling out an incident on Feb. 17, 2003, three days after the foreign minister's theatrical call in New York for the world to stop the Americans. He writes that Villepin, "pushed by his administration," confided that France could not hold its stance beyond mid-March "and would then link up with the United States." At a news conference in Brussels, when a reporter asked Chirac about Villepin's view, the president replied angrily that the question was "lacking the slightest basis in fact."

Taking up the issue recently with Chirac, Péan described him as having "to be reminded of Villepin's hesitation and his own brutal reaction to it. He contested that, and laid the responsibility for the wavering on the Quai d'Orsay administration's influence on the minister."

I asked Péan last week about Villepin's wobbling. He replied, "It's an ultra-sensitive subject, an essential subject, but one I didn't sort out. No one wants to talk about it today. It's a place where there was a problem."

How did the event, if Péan's account is right, blip off history's scope? One explanation could be that it was lost in the storm over Chirac's remarks at the same news conference that countries from the former Soviet bloc would have done better to shut up than announce their support for the United States.

In the end, riding his great poll numbers in March, Chirac threatened a veto if the United States pressed for a UN vote to authorize military action. The Arab regimes he hoped to please considered this an excessive overplay, and Chirac's action further widened Europe's internal split.

If it caused nothing like the awful repercussions of America's failure to win the war, France's lurching pursuit of the best yield for itself in the runup left it totally short of what its leaders hoped their opposition would bring.

As Chirac and Villepin depart, the country's role in the Middle East has shriveled to a bystander's, and what was its dwindling primacy in the European Union - which they hoped to reassert by massing European opposition to the United States - has basically vanished.

Péan's book, with its in-spite-of-itself insights, acknowledges none of this failure. Last week, the newspaper Le Parisien reported that Chirac adored reading it. All the same, it quoted the president as saying, "You can't accuse the author of trying to please."

3/20/2007 6:25 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

"L'Inconnu de l'Élysée," the country's top nonfiction best seller, while idealizing Chirac's role, brings unexpected new support to a thesis that France's government was not so much struggling to save humanity as looking out for Numéro Un.

Where have we heard this before?... Hmmmmm...

3/20/2007 8:11 PM
Mr roT said...

Not from many French, not surprisingly.

3/20/2007 8:13 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

...hmmmmm, it just seems as though I've heard this argument before. Seems a recurring theme in twentieth-century French history anyhow... and now in the early twenty first.

3/20/2007 10:17 PM

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