MON COMBAT POUR LA PAIX
par Jack Chirac
En librairie le 23 mars 2007

« J’ai toujours été sensible à la place singulière de la France dans le monde.

La France est dépositaire d’une vision, de valeurs, d’un idéal humaniste, héritage des Lumières qu’elle porte au cœur des problèmes du monde. Elle se veut, aujourd’hui comme hier, messagère d’universel.

Conduire la politique étrangère de la France au XXIe siècle, c’est porter un projet politique d’ensemble.

Je veille à ce que la France soit en permanence à l’écoute, engagée pour la paix. Je veille à ce qu’elle propose des réponses nouvelles aux questions politiques, économiques, sociales, culturelles, écologiques, qu’il faut aujour-d’hui résoudre à l’échelle globale. Je veille à ce qu’elle agisse dans le respect des nations, des peuples et des cultures dont la diversité constitue plus que jamais, pour le monde, une richesse indispensable. »

["I have always been sensitive to the singular place of France in the world.

France is a trustee of a vision, of values, of a humanistic ideal, heritage of the Enlightenment that she carries to the heart of the problems of the world. She wants to be, today [and here and here and here] like yesterday, messenger of the universal.

To lead French foreign policy into the 21st century, is to advance a complete political project.

I take care that France is always listening, committed to peace. I take care that she proposes new answers to the political, economic, social, cultural, and ecological questions, which must today be solved on a total scale. I take care that she acts respectul of the nations [and here], the people and the cultures whose diversity constitutes more than ever, for the world, an essential richness."]

Ah...yeah.

LE COMBATTANT DES FOUTAISES
Available In Overstock March 24

John Vinocur looks at le combattant de la paix.

A DIFFERENT TAKE ON FRANCE'S ROLE IN IRAQ

March 20, 2007 (IHT) - 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.

... But in trying to transmute the fog of the runup to the war into glory, [Pierre Péan's L’Inconnu de l'Élysée (The Stranger at the Élysée)] may provide more clarity than intended...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.

... Péan's book points further to a 2003 article by [James Rubin, assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Bill Clinton,] 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."

None of this is news to veteran Pave skimmers. That France should act the self-dealer is not shocking. That is what nations do. Those that don't soon become former nations. And Pave, under the current editorship, has no quarrel with France sitting out Iraq. All we have asked is that France stop fobbing off a political calculation as a selfless piety, the selfless piety of a righteous morally ordered France. [Pause to crack a window. Fresh air restores our sight.]

France had other goals, less lofty goals, in opposing the liberation of Iraq.

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.

Having miscalculated, having overplayed his hand, Jack now desperately leads, not the world, but the media in painting a liberated Iraq as a failure. In doing so Jack the Peace Warrior abets and prolongs the bloodshed.

PFFT (What is this?): Failure is success 4 | Rayonnement français 0