http://www.nypost.com/cgi-bin/printfriendly.pl NY Post FRANCE LOVES TYRANTS By JONATHAN FOREMAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- November 17, 2002 -- WHAT makes France's partial U.N. victory over the United States all the more galling is that it is also a triumph for a foreign policy that persistently favors monstrous, murderous - often genocidally murderous - regimes. And yes, the Security Council resolution on Iraq was largely a triumph for France and a defeat for the United States: The French got almost everything they wanted. They forced the removal or qualification of trigger phrases like "material breach" from the resolution. Worse, they forced the U.S. concession that the Security Council will have to meet yet again before Saddam is held to have defied the latest demand for his disarmament. So after Saddam moves to frustrate the latest inspection regime, we'll be back in the Security Council, with the French claiming that his breaches aren't serious enough for the approval of an American-led military campaign. With what glee the diplomats of the Quai d'Orsay must have popped their champagne corks at their humiliation of the American "hyperpower," their demonstration of France's enduring global clout and the favor they have done for France's friend in Bagdhad. It was the kind of triumph that fuels so much of the anti-French rhetoric that pops up on Anglo-Saxon opinion pages, especially in conservative publications - like the columnist who routinely describes the French as "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys." In fact, the French have never been cowards. But in propogating a silly myth, such rhetoric makes a worse error: It misses a genuinely sinister truth about France's role in the world, namely the blood-red thread of support for tyrants and mass murderers that runs through her foreign policy. A deadly combination of cynicism and narcissism consistently informs French foreign policy, causing it to be the world's great protector of genocidal regimes: * In 1994, the French with their African bases were the one military power in a position to stop the Rwanda genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu. Instead, in Operation Turquoise they created a safe haven for the perpetrators of the genocide, the Hutu Interahamwe militia. Why? Because the Tutsis chasing the murderers had become Anglophones in exile and French cultural vanity couldn't abide the loss of a French-speaking country. * During the Balkan wars, pro-Serb French military officers allowed the murder of Bosnian politicians in convoys they were supposed to be protecting and leaked NATO secrets to Slobodan Milosevic. Meanwhile French diplomats conspired with Serbs and Croats to liquidate the nascent Bosnian state. The French continued to be the primary obstacle to serious, effective intervention against "ethnic cleansing" until the United States broke the stalemate. With U.S. participation, action became inevitable - and the French changed sides. Yet even after NATO intervention, deliberate leaks by French officers enabled Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb war criminal, to escape NATO capture. Twice. * In the first Gulf War, between Iran and Iraq, it was the French, not the Americans as is often put about, who (with the Russians and Chinese) were Saddam Hussein's chief arms suppliers. Now they are among the prime foreign beneficiaries of the "Oil for Food" program, through which Saddam legally spends some of his oil wealth. The maintenance of Saddam's nightmarish rule over Iraq continues to be a major goal of French foreign policy. Though it had the additional benefit of frustrating the "Anglo-Saxon" powers, this, not the preservation of "peace" or stability, was the real point of France's efforts in the Security Council. While it isn't clear whether American concessions in the text of the resolution will make much difference to an ultimate U.N. go-ahead for military action, the delays caused by French obstinacy may well have won Saddam a reprieve until campaigning season comes around again next winter. Don't think for a minute that the Quai D'Orsay isn't perfectly aware of the mass murders of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs by the Saddam regime. But France's ruthless notion of "realism" (a popular maxim of the French diplomatic corps is "the task of diplomacy is to expedite the inevitable") makes those crimes irrelevant. We in the United States have done some bad things in the name of realpolitik. But with the exception of our unforgiveable support of the Khmer Rouge, we have never stooped this low. And when it does finally come time for America to forcibly remove Saddam from power, and his fall becomes as "inevitable" as were the deaths of all those Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, France will immediately be desperate to be in on the action - notwithstanding its past friendship with the dictator or any of the principles it has cited in the last few months in support of that friendship. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
