Franco-German peace offensive

[REDWAVE]

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union acted as a counterweight restraining U.S. imperialism to some extent. Since its collapse, the "world's only superpower" has strode arrogantly throughout the world, attacking one weak, helpless nation after another: Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and now Iraq is threatened with renewed aggression. The inter-imperialist rivalries which led to World Wars One and Two, suppressed during the Cold War, have now re-emerged with a vengeance.

The diplomatic infighting between the U.S., on the one hand, and France and Germany, on the other, is especially fascinating. Rummy's derisive comments about "old Europe" almost made me think he planned on bombing France next. In response, Schroeder and Chirac put their heads together and came up with a peace plan to try to hold off the U.S. military juggernaut. Their plan would make Iraq a virtual U.N. protectorate, and if accepted by Iraq, would eliminate any need or possible justification for an attack on Iraq. (Of course, since when has Our Glorious Unelected Leader Bush needed any justification?) The Bushies were furious about the latest perfidious effort by the French and Germans to thwart U.S. aggression, and make peace break out instead. Also, they've practically declared war on NATO now because France, Germany, and Belgium (go, Belgium!) blocked a U.S. effort to "defend" Turkey. Although Turkey (like the U.S.) has some pretences to being a democracy, it really is more of a military dictatorship (again, like the U.S.), and savagely represses its own Kurds. Funny, you don't hear any of the Bushies denouncing Turkey for that. The Turkish government is brutal and despotic, but hey-- they're our brutal despots.

That makes all the difference.

 

[Guest]

I thought the Americans ate all them birds on Thanks Giving.

 

[teddybear4play]

When are you going to mention that the supposedly altruistic French have their own financial ties to Iraq that they don't want to lose?

Or that they're acting unilaterally and imperialistically in Cote d'Ivoire?

Your head's full of shit it's a wonder you don't tip over.

TB4p

 

[REDWAVE]

You don't read very well, do you?

You obviously have much more experience with a cranium filled with excrement than I do, tb4p. I never said the French were being altruistic. In my original post, I stated clearly this was a case of inter-imperialist rivalries heating back up. Learn how to read first; then you might be able to take me on in a political argument.

 

[Weevil]

I will say that I am shocked, absolutely blown away, that the French want to avoid a war.

 

[REDWAVE]

Amour, non Guerre!

I will say that I am shocked, absolutely blown away, that the French want to avoid a war.

Yes, it is an astonishing revelation, is it not? Viva le France!

 

[Weevil]

Nice try. But it's Vive la France.

 

[8ball]

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union acted as a counterweight restraining U.S. imperialism to some extent. Since its collapse, the "world's only superpower" has strode arrogantly throughout the world, attacking one weak, helpless nation after another: Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and now Iraq is threatened with renewed aggression. The inter-imperialist rivalries which led to World Wars One and Two, suppressed during the Cold War, have now re-emerged with a vengeance.

The diplomatic infighting between the U.S., on the one hand, and France and Germany, on the other, is especially fascinating. Rummy's derisive comments about "old Europe" almost made me think he planned on bombing France next. In response, Schroeder and Chirac put their heads together and came up with a peace plan to try to hold off the U.S. military juggernaut. Their plan would make Iraq a virtual U.N. protectorate, and if accepted by Iraq, would eliminate any need or possible justification for an attack on Iraq. (Of course, since when has Our Glorious Unelected Leader Bush needed any justification?) The Bushies were furious about the latest perfidious effort by the French and Germans to thwart U.S. aggression, and make peace break out instead. Also, they've practically declared war on NATO now because France, Germany, and Belgium (go, Belgium!) blocked a U.S. effort to "defend" Turkey. Although Turkey (like the U.S.) has some pretences to being a democracy, it really is more of a military dictatorship (again, like the U.S.), and savagely represses its own Kurds. Funny, you don't hear any of the Bushies denouncing Turkey for that. The Turkish government is brutal and despotic, but hey-- they're our brutal despots.

That makes all the difference.

I almost stopped reading when you referred to Irag as a weak and helpless nation. I did when you called the US a military dictatorship.

 

[busybody..]

One has to admire the chutzpah involved in calling the plan Mirage ("something illusory: something that is unreal or merely imagined"). Let's be clear that as a practical matter it has no chance at all of accomplishing its stated goal. The AP news report on this refers to the troops involved as "peacekeepers", but what it actually would be is an army of occupation. Even at the most optimistic, you're talking about no more than 30,000 troops, armed mostly with light weapons (no artillery, no tanks, maybe a few armored cars) with little in the way of air support (perhaps fifty or a hundred French jets) to try to impose invasive inspections on a nation which had not actually been defeated in war, with an intact army numbering in excess of half a million.

If the government of Iraq cooperates fully, 100%, then this might well actually work. But if there's anything which is clear now, it's that Saddam has no intention of actually getting rid of his WMDs. If he was actually willing to cooperate, he'd have done so a long time ago. So inevitably the time would come when the inspectors would, with their accompanying UN guards, try to enter some facility or home or something, and would run into armed men who refused to let them in. Maybe the Iraqis resisting them point their AK-47's directly at the inspectors. Maybe they fire over their heads. (Both happened during the previous round of inspections which ended in 1998.) Would the UN troops actually be willing to attack in such a case, to force their way in? Would they be willing to call in air strikes to obliterate any building they were not allowed to enter (say, a hospital or grade school or mosque)? Not a chance. The record on that kind of thing internationally is extremely poor; these kinds of forces are most successful when deployed to places where the people themselves actually support the international troops. When there's substantial local resistance, or a local force which refuses to go along, the result is usually catastrophe.

Thus it was that international peacekeepers in Bosnia could not prevent slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, and thus it was that international peacekeepers in Rwanda did not act to prevent the genocide. They wore their blue berets, and carried the UN flag, but when it actually came time to either fight or withdraw, they nearly always withdraw. (Local commanders wanted to fight. In both Bosnia and in Rwanda, the local commander pleaded with his government for permission to resist, and was ordered not to.)

What would they do if they were subject to random gunfire from hidden gunmen? The government of Iraq would deny any involvement (and blame the Americans) but you'd start having a steady low level rate of casualties and no way to stop it. How long before the nations providing those forces pull them out? What happens when no one is willing to send any replacements?

And if the government of Iraq decided, no matter why, to end the charade and mobilized its army, it could capture and hold hostage a large part of this force (because a lot of it will be dispersed), and lay siege to the rest. As Werner says, the only real guarantee of safety such troops would have would be for the US military to be poised on the Iraqi border to invade and bail them out if things went wrong.

And that isn't practical. The forces we're deploying to the region can't be maintained at this strength and battle-readiness indefinitely. That's not even close to being possible. Nor can we afford to tie up such a large proportion of our military strength in this way for years. But without our military ready to stomp Saddam (and with no one else in the world able to place an equivalent threat in the region), this international force would be helpless in the face of any active resistance by the government of Iraq, whether small or large.

So as a practical matter, the only way this plan could actually result in disarmament would be if Saddam actually totally completely surrendered and if everything went perfectly, and the actual chance of that is negligible. Anything short of that and it ends up a massive failure.

But the purpose of this proposal by France isn't actually to be a credible alternative. Even if it were tried and it failed, it would give TotalFinaElf another six months or two years to milk the oil-for-food program, and since this plan leaves Saddam in power it might make it possible for the French to begin to implement the other oil deals they made with Saddam. And since the force doing this work would be dominated by the French (and Germans) they could conveniently destroy any evidence they found which implicated the corporations or governments there in violating the sanctions and in shipping in forbidden militarily-useful products, not to mention anything else they really wish they could cover up. So I don't actually think they'd mind if we were somehow coerced into giving it a try.

But I don't seriously think that either government actually expects us to agree to this. However, even if we don't they still are much better off with this proposal in play than without it, and that's why I must grudgingly concede that they've made a good play here in the international game.

Logical arguments against the plan (such as presented above) will have no important effect. Expect war-opponents all over the world to rally to this idea and begin pushing it. And when advocates of war try to argue that it has little chance of success, they will respond, "But it might work and if so we could avoid the infinite catastrophe of war; we have to at least give it a try before you invade!" And then they will lay out a litany of the expected carnage, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead after the US inevitably carpet-bombs every Iraqi city, and millions of starvation victims when the flow of supplies breaks down in the chaos after the war and you've heard it all before, not to mention all the Iraqis who would die when we bombed the places where Iraq is storing the chemical weapons it doesn't have and cause those chemicals to be released to drift over the nearby orphanages and retirement homes. "Isn't it worth giving this a try to avoid all that? How can you be so heartless as to want to cause such great amounts of death and destruction?" Rational argument (e.g. "The war isn't actually going to cause that kind of carnage; we don't carpet bomb cities any longer.") has no effect, because those making these arguments aren't really interested in anything except opposing war.

At least a few of them are beginning to be honest: what they really fear is that we'll fight, and win easily, with a low rate of casualties among our soldiers and Iraq's soldiers and Iraq's civilians. They're afraid that this will encourage us to conquer more nations and create an American Empire. From their point of view, an easy American victory (which is also the most likely result once combat begins) is the worst possible outcome. Maintenance of the status quo is better, no matter how much suffering that condemns individual Iraqis to as they remain under Saddam's boot. So their best hope now is to prevent us from attacking at all, and thus they will cleave to this proposal no matter what rational arguments are made against it, not because they actually believe this proposal will work, but because it's the only chance they have of preventing a new American empire.

In the UNSC, this French (and German, but effectively just French) proposal largely nullifies the diplomatic value of Powell's presentation. He did his best in his presentation to make it clear that the UNSC either was on the side of the US in attacking, or on the side of Saddam by preventing an attack. Now those who oppose us are able to say that they have a third choice: they're not supporting Saddam; they hate him just as much as we do. They're not trying to help him keep his WMDs; they also want those gone, they'll say. They just don't think war is the right answer, and lookie here, we can get rid of those pesky WMDs without an American invasion if only we do this simple operation right here involving tripling the number of inspectors and sending in a few thousand lightly armed international troops. And in fact, when the US then argues that it won't work they can actually try to claim that it could work if only the hyperpower was willing to use its massive military strength to support it. See, if it fails it would be because you damned cowboys didn't want it to work, because you're so enchanted with the idea of war and capturing Iraq's oil fields and getting revenge on Saddam for trying to assassinate Bush's daddy. So you're not open to a better, more multilateral, more peaceful, more sophisticated way; you'd rather "rush to war". And besides which, this fulfills your demand that we punish Saddam with more stringent measures for not having taken advantage of his final chance as presented in Res 1441. The UNSC is not shrinking from enforcing its proposals; it just doesn't want to authorize fullscale war by America to do so, they'll say. Oh, and by the way, you also have to order the CIA and NSA and MI6 to open their books and reveal everything they know about what Iraq's been doing so that the inspectors can really find things.

This makes it much easier for France (and Russia and China) to vote against any Anglo-American proposal authorizing war. It makes it easier for the ten non-veto nations in the UNSC to not support us. It means that failure to support us no longer amounts to tacit denial of (or approval of) the terrible things about Saddam that Powell revealed. They can now condemn Saddam and still refuse to support us. And it means that we're pretty much going to have to go on without a resolution authorizing war because the chance now of getting one within the relevant time window is rapidly declining.

Who this actually hurts the most is Tony Blair. The French have foxed him. He has taken major risks politically to support us, and now the chance of it costing him his position as leader of Labour is much higher. I hope it doesn't come to that; he doesn't deserve it.

It should be made clear now that as long as Kuwait and Qatar continue to cooperate, and it's hard to see how that would change any time soon, that the US operating alone, using only its own military forces in the region (which we have deployed or will eventually deploy), is still capable of fighting and winning. The military contribution from the UK is substantial and extremely valuable, and I would far rather have their 38,000 troops and 100 aircraft to help us than to go in without it. But we can win without them.

 

[Weevil]

This just in:

Busybody is an idiot.

 

[REDWAVE]

Long winded, too.

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

http://www.time.com/time/cartoons/20030207/8.html

 

[KookyDooky]

Re: Re: Franco-German peace offensive

I almost stopped reading when you referred to Irag as a weak and helpless nation. I did when you called the US a military dictatorship.

You must be another one of those "USA, all the way, yeehaw" people. Sorry to hear that you're another brainwashed sheep being herded by Bush.

bhaaa bhaaa bhaaa

 

[Oliver Clozoff]

A person is brainwashed if he doesn't believe the US is a military dictatorship?

 

[8ball]

Re: Re: Re: Franco-German peace offensive

You must be another one of those "USA, all the way, yeehaw" people. Sorry to hear that you're another brainwashed sheep being herded by Bush.

bhaaa bhaaa bhaaa

Only when arguing with "damn the USA, they are the root of ALL evil in the world, and I am going to make statements that are stinking with nothing but rhetoric" people.

 

[busybody..]

Weasel Watch


France and Germany are engaging in increasingly aggressive diplomacy on Saddam Hussein's behalf. Over the weekend they leaked word of a new proposal to prevent the Iraqi dictator's overthrow. London's Guardian describes it:

According to one unconfirmed report in the German magazine Der Spiegel, UN blue-helmet soldiers would be deployed in Iraq and the number of weapons inspectors tripled. Some 150,000 US soldiers based close to Iraq's borders would remain in place to ensure the "peaceful invasion" of the blue helmets and secure their mission.

The weasels' policy seems to be Saddam at any price--including a rupture in the Atlantic alliance. This morning, as CNN notes, France and Germany (along with Europe's toy poodle, Belgium) blocked NATO from making plans to defend Turkey in the event that Iraq attacks it.

The Franco-German U.N. initiative "could have a devastating impact," observes Tim Hames in the Times of London. "It has the capacity to shatter the unity of the UN Security Council, hole Nato below the waterline, put transatlantic relations into permafrost and leave Tony Blair utterly exposed on this issue." Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder would no doubt love to shaft their rival Blair, whose steadfastness on Iraq has been nothing short of heroic. But that seems a small benefit compared to the costs of destroying NATO, discrediting the U.N. and alienating America.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on the absurdity of the proposal itself. When the U.N. passed Resolution 1441, it promised "serious consequences" if Baghdad failed to comply with its earlier mandates. Everyone understood that to mean military intervention, not tripling the inspectors. No one is calling on France and Germany to participate in Iraq's liberation; Germany (along with Cuba and Libya) has already said it will not, and France is more than welcome to sit on the sidelines too. But surely both countries would contribute troops to the proposed U.N. force, since it's their initiative. Chirac and Schroeder, in other words, are willing to put their boys in harm's way to keep Saddam in power.

Why are France and Germany willing to take such immense risks for Saddam's sake? The usual explanations--commercial interests, anti-American pique, intra-European politicking--don't seem entirely satisfying. We're drawn back to Steven Den Beste's speculation, which we noted last month:

Suppose we (the UK and US) do ignore all the pressure and last-minute finagling and do actually attack Iraq, which I think now is virtually certain.

Suppose we win, which is absolutely certain.

And suppose, once we've done so, and have occupied Iraq and have full (really full, not UN full) access to Iraq's records and can truly find what they have, that we find that everything we've been saying about their WMDs is really true; that they have chem and bio weapons and banned delivery systems, and are near to developing nukes, which I also think is extremely likely.

One more and the most important: suppose that the records also show that during the 1990's companies in France or Germany (or both) actively and deliberately broke the sanctions and sold equipment and supplies to Iraq which helped it to create these things, and that the governments of Germany and France knew and approved of this and actively helped.

Den Beste is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and he's careful to acknowledge the speculative nature of his scenario. But he's right to say that if such information is found and if it is publicly revealed, the consequences for NATO, the U.N. and America's relationship with these two ostensible allies could be catastrophic. Den Beste concludes:

If they (Chirac and Schröder) know that they face the scenario I described above after we invade, that would definitely explain their behavior, because preventing Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is the only conceivable way they could prevent it. If this is the case, then since no other way exists to avoid this fate and since the consequences of it are dreadful, it would make sense to continue the lost cause of trying to prevent our attack.

So the more they persist even as it becomes ever more hopeless, the more I find myself worrying that they are trying to cover up something really, really big.

I do hope I'm wrong, though

 

[REDWAVE]

bb

As opposed to the U.S. of A., of course, which we all know wants to subject Iraq to massive terror bombing, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, invade and conquer the country and occupy it for 20 years, and seize control of its vast oil wealth, all for the purest, most benevolent, and altruistic of purposes . . .

 

[busybody..]

Re: bb

As opposed to the U.S. of A., of course, which we all know wants to subject Iraq to massive terror bombing, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, invade and conquer the country and occupy it for 20 years, and seize control of its vast oil wealth, all for the purest, most benevolent, and altruistic of purposes . . .

I knew you would come to your senses.......eventually

 

[Don K Dyck]

Re: bb

As opposed to the U.S. of A., of course, which we all know wants to subject Iraq to massive terror bombing, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, invade and conquer the country and occupy it for 20 years, and seize control of its vast oil wealth, all for the purest, most benevolent, and altruistic of purposes . . .

Hi Redwave,

Thanx for keeping us updated about events and attitudes in Europe . . . here in Oz we suffer from media block-out . . . the ravings of the U$ media are allowed to engulf news from any other part of the world . . . conspiracists would have a ball with that idea . . . must be an Imperialist War about to happen somewhere . . .

Slowly, very slowly, Europe as the EU, is realising that they have little to gain from the U$ oil corporations and their White House subsiduary "stealing" Iraqi oil reserves . . . as oil becomes more scarce, where will the burgeoning European economy get the necessary oil for industrial fuels?

The future is going to be more Eurocentric than the past . . . strong economies, controlled budgets, limited spending on armaments . . . just the sort of economy in which any sound capitalist would like to invest.

 

[mbb308]

I gotta agree that the French may use the veto to position themselves as a nation to be courted and not taken lightly.

What amuses me about their veto vote is that "victors" of WWII wound up as permanent members of the UNSC. That completely ignores that document France signed in a railway car in June of 1940, does it not?

 

[REDWAVE]

Fightback

Russia has now joined Germany and France in saying more time is needed for inspections. An international day of protest against war is coming up Feb. 15. There will even be a demonstration here in Lost Wages, in front of the Bellagio.

Bush's push toward war is making him increasingly vulnerable politically.

 

[mbb308]

Re: Fightback

Bush's push toward war is making him increasingly vulnerable politically.

As some Dem blogs are posting, a lack of war would focus a whole lot of attention on the economy. They indicate the administration might not want that to happen.

 

[REDWAVE]

There is that

War makes a hell of a distraction, and provides an excuse for imposing "sacrifices" at home.

 

[Guest]

If you check your history you will find that France has always traded this way

The War to end all wars France was the biggest trader with Germany

World War II France was the biggest trader with Germany
and Italy

And now France trades with Iraq

Is there a pattern here that most people don't see?

 

[Guru]