Cover Story: What’s up with the French?

Americans are unaccustomed to coherent political speech. Their neurons have been conditioned to respond to the bombast of Manifest Destiny and the code words of racism, leaving the bulk of the population incapable of rational thought. This crippling condition – which also compels white Americans to vote against their own interests – afflicts the U.S. information dispensing classes in full measure. Therefore, this pregnant moment in history will pass unnoticed by much of the American public, who have heard hardly a word of serious analysis of the French position on Iraq, as presented for general evaluation by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, September 12, in the Paris newspaper-of-record, Le Monde.

Packaged as a mere newspaper “article” so as to avoid the limitations of diplomat-speak, the French position is comprehensible to elites and politically attuned readers everywhere – except the Delusional States of America. Although elegantly crafted, the article all but shouts a challenge to U.S. hegemonic ambitions. France, the “Not-American” imperialist, is seizing the moment for which it has long prepared.

One million white Frenchmen lived in Algeria in 1956 when the U.S. thwarted French-British-Israeli plans to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt. The British soon acclimated themselves to the American shadow, while the French later developed their own nuclear weapons capability and withdrew from the command structure of NATO. Believing themselves peculiarly conversant with Third World perceptions and sensibilities (based largely on the intimate Algerian experience), and determined to preserve French business interests and international stature, successive governments positioned Paris as an “alternative” Great Power. What the blustering, bulldog Americans mistook as French pretension was, in reality, a sophisticated strategy that played against crude, racist American bullying tactics in the Third World. Yes, the French are imperialists, but at least they are not Americans.

The Americans have no intention of becoming an Iraqi border patrol – although an overstretched and emotionally drained U.S. military may soon find these are the only duties they can handle.

The French propose that the U.S.-appointed Governing Council and ministers “would be considered by the UN Security Council as the guardians of Iraqi sovereignty during the transition period. Very soon, perhaps in a month, an interim Iraqi government could be established based on these bodies with executive powers progressively transferred to it, including economic and budgetary activities.”

The key phrase here is “guardians of Iraqi sovereignty.” French intentions could not be clearer, fully justifying Colin Powell’s huge discomfort at last weekend’s meeting of Security Council member ministers, in Geneva. France is most keen to close the legal door to the United States creating further “facts on the ground” designed to entangle the Iraqi nation in an American corporate embrace – forever. The international drama is not about a few French, German or Russian oil contracts here and there, no more than the U.S. invasion was launched for the sole benefit of Halliburton and Bechtel. France is challenging U.S. claims to a super-national right to manipulate or erase the sovereignty of nations – the legal basis for world order and the only way that civilized nations know how to do business. In this, France speaks for the world, no matter how selfish her motives might be.

So critical is the question of Iraqi sovereignty, France is willing to accept the handpicked Governing Council on an interim basis in order to move the prize a square or two away from grasping American hands.

The French “timetable should provide for all the stages of a constitutional process with the aim of presenting a draft text by the end of the year. A general election could be envisioned as soon as possible, by spring 2004.”

France appears to be betting that the Iraqi appointees will find new backbones and the energy to actually work on a constitution, should there emerge a real prospect for, in de Villepin’s words, “placing the Iraqi people at the heart of the reconstruction process.” If the U.S. interferes, the onus will be on Washington.