"It is extraordinary how little France has gained after 46 years of doggedly pitting itself against the United States."

France about-turns into a bigger military mess
Michael Portillo

The Sunday Times August 27, 2006







‘Il faut aller à Gorazde.” (“We must push through to Gorazde.”) The French defence minister would repeat it like a chant. It was 1995. In Srebrenica, a United Nations so-called safe haven in Bosnia, 8,000 men had been slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs.

Gorazde was another enclave that the UN had promised to defend. But the French and British forces in the region were many miles away. As participants in a UN humanitarian mission they were lightly armed. They had lorries, not tanks, and no aircraft. So the idea of pushing through to Gorazde was fanciful.

It had been a French general, Philippe Morillon, who as head of the UN forces in the former Yugoslavia had first pledged to protect Srebrenica. He did not have the resources to keep that promise and Dutch UN forces in the city did nothing to prevent the massacre. We (the other Nato defence ministers) found a word to describe the French habit of making impressive statements with no means to put them into effect. We called it “grandstanding”.

That gallic custom has been on display again over Lebanon. After the French had taken a vociferous lead in drafting the UN security council resolution that brought about the ceasefire, it was shocking to discover that France was offering just 200 soldiers towards a UN force of 15,000. Late last week, after wasting valuable time since hostilities ended nearly two weeks ago, President Chirac gave way. Having attracted the world’s scorn he raised his country’s offer to 2,000.

There is a cultural difference between the French and the British obvious in their diplomatic styles. The French believe that what they say is at least as important as what they do. They spin grandiloquent phrases and strike postures. Rhetoric is away of life and if you point out it is divorced from all strategic reality that is thought to be nitpicking.


The British, on the other hand, get engrossed in tedious detail like: “Is this practical? Who is going to supply the troops? What will be their rules of engagement?” With Lebanon the French have discovered phrase-making is not enough. In recent days they have become very practical, bleating that there are no established rules of engagement (governing what the soldiers can do and when they can fire) almost as though they were British.

If any country could have settled such important details in advance it is France. It took the kudos for working up the UN resolution. It acted as spokesman for the Arab world within the permanent five members of the council. It insisted that the resolution should not be made under chapter 7 of the UN charter, which would have given the troops the right to impose their will by force.

The unclear rules of engagement derive directly from the ambiguity of the French-inspired resolution. But France has nonetheless used the uncertainty as an excuse for delay. At any time France could have eased the problem by offering to lead the UN forces and proposing rules for all participants. Then every nation would insist on its own variations. They always do. French forces are now arriving in Lebanon with the mission and the rules still unspecified. Chirac claimed he had received assurances from the UN that enabled him to increase French numbers.

In reality he buckled because the Italians had offered to lead the deployment and the Americans had mischievously welcomed that bizarre idea. France could not bear the mortification of operating under the command of its southern neighbour — least of all in Lebanon, a country so strongly tied to the French by history and culture. Chirac’s sheer ineptness has brought him avoidable humiliation. Already held in contempt by America and disdained by the British, he has now advertised his unreliability to a wider global audience.

At the heart of this mess is France’s reluctance to tackle Hezbollah. Back in 2004 the security council adopted resolution 1559 demanding that the terrorist organisation be disarmed. Like many resolutions it is a declaration without serious intent. In the two years since it was adopted nothing has been done, at least not until the recent Israeli military campaign, and that was denounced by most countries, including France. During recent days, as France has procrastinated, arms have been pouring in from Syria and Iran to re-equip the terror group. France’s failures of both diplomacy and nerve have made it less likely that the ceasefire will hold, and made the UN mission more dangerous.

There is now no suggestion that UN troops will attempt to disarm Hezbollah in accordance with UN policy. The question must be rather, to what extent will the French-led mission turn a blind eye to the group’s re-armament? If Hezbollah moves its Katyusha rockets back to the Israeli border, will the blue-helmeted Frenchmen stand in their way? It is extraordinary how little France has gained after 46 years of doggedly pitting itself against the United States. Perhaps President Charles de Gaulle was still reeling from the shame of the second world war (when France had had to be rescued from Nazism by America and Britain) when he expelled the American-dominated Nato from Paris in 1960. The North Atlantic alliance hurriedly relocated itself in a hospital building in Brussels that had just been finished but not yet occupied by the Belgian health service. It is housed there still, and visitors often remark on the wide corridors, not realising they were designed for trolleys.

Since 1960 successive presidents have chafed against American influence in Europe and the world. They begrudged Europe’s reliance on US forces stationed in Germany to defend us from the Soviet threat. But France (in common with other European countries) was unwilling to transfer money from social to military spending to reduce that dependency. The sense of being in America’s debt has powerfully increased French resentment of Washington.

France’s performance in Bosnia actually did something to restore its prestige. Despite the rhetorical hyperbole, once Nato had taken over from the UN, French troops performed effectively. For a short while US impatience with Europe (over its inability to handle crises on its own territory) was reduced.

But that relative success seemed only to encourage France to move apart from America. In the years after the Gulf war of 1991 it gradually peeled away from the alliance that enforced the no-fly zones protecting Iraqi Kurds from air attack. Chirac had enjoyed a special relationship with Saddam and with the Arab world in general. He sought to establish a European foreign policy that was unAmerican and more pro-Arab. The French also worked to make the EU into a military alliance that could be used for peacekeeping without American support. As usual, the purple prose ran far ahead of what European forces could actually do unassisted.

Now that British and American forces are bogged down in Iraq, this should be the moment for the French cock to crow. But what exactly has the distinctive French alternative produced for the world or France? The softer European approach to Iran over its nuclear programme was decisively rebuffed, and Europe has had to join America in calling for sanctions. When France was invited to provide leadership over Lebanon, it vacillated. Its offer of 2,000 soldiers remains underwhelming. Chirac’s pro-Arab policies have not even bought off Muslim discontent at home, as the urban riots showed.

Last week a former junior member of the Bush administration, Jeff Babbin, likened undertaking a military operation without the French to going on a deer shoot without an accordion — you just leave behind the noisy useless baggage. For France to have split so decisively with the globe’s most powerful nation without having established a successful alternative approach to the resolution of crises is a major policy failure for Chirac. Whatever criticisms he may have of George W Bush, the American does not fail to put his troops where his mouth is.

That is where Chirac has been caught out. In the case of Lebanon, grandstanding was not enough. He has now stepped forward to do his duty with all the relish of a man slipping into a quicksand. French forces may be ineffective, or suffer casualties, or both. Washington cannot wait to see what happens next.






[France]
[Jacques Chirac]
[Iraq]
[Lebanon]
[Iraq]
[Kofi Annan]
[UN]
[Bush]