October 03, 2003, 8:30 a.m.
Let France Do It

After a weeklong wind-up, the U.S. has made its formal pitch to the U.N. — and, according to the EuroPress, it was high and outside. Kofi Annan said he was "disappointed" in it. The Germans, as Suddeutscher Zeitung noted , were more circumspect. And according to this report in Le Monde, the French ambassador said, sadly, that the U.S. proposals just didn't "respond to [French] hopes."

The new French strategy seems to be to play a much more passive-aggressive role with respect to the U.S. — as opposed to their prewar stance, which was violently pacifistic. On September 28, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin previewed the French position when he explained to Jean-Pierre Elkabbach on France's Europe 1 radio (oddly missing from the Elkabbach archive) that the situation in Iraq is "like a big wheel, with the occupation authorities at the center." At the moment, continued Villepin, "all the spokes of this wheel are being formed, defining themselves, against the American and British occupation regime....What we must do is take the occupation regime from the hub of the wheel and replace it with Iraqi sovereignty."

The logic of Villepin is that Bush wouldn't be asking for help if things were actually improving in Iraq. Besides, the daily press makes it clear that Iraq is a growing disaster. Lining up France squarely behind Howard Dean and CNN, Villepin told listeners that in Iraq, "We must see things as they really are. The situation is not good. Indeed, it is bad. There is a spiral of violence and terrorism..." And, he added, insufficient security to even begin letting the U.N. help.

Reality check: According to the antiwar zealots at Lunaville.org, on average, one Coalition soldier dies every day in Iraq, for one reason or another. Could be a rocket grenade, could be a traffic accident, could be a broken heart. That's the lowest casualty rate since hostilities began, down from 1.39 deaths per day in August. Some spiral. (In August in France, meanwhile, during the heat wave, 500 people died every day because of neglect and French governmental incompetence.)

So, let's just say we gave the U.N. the leading role in Iraq, and buttressed the whole operation with the genius of French military might. How would we do?

To find out, let's take a look at the French-led U.N. mission in Ivory Coast. In that once-calm and prosperous corner of the Big Nowhere, happy Ivorians used to drive Mercedes and buy mutual funds, just like the rest of us.

But then the tribes in the northern half of the country, who just happen to be Muslim, decided to wage war on the non-Muslims in the south.

Because Ivory Coast is in what France perceives to be its sphere of influence (they speak French in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital), France went to the U.N. and got a stamp of approval on something called "Operation Licorne" and brought the combatants together in the Marcoussis Accords, which called for the usual: The government sort of surrenders, the rebels are brought in, there's a transitional phase, then democracy rises like a chimney sweep from the ashes. To give the whole show some special effects and the ring of truth, they started spending a million euros a day.

That was a year ago. How are they doing?

According to the U.N.'s ReliefWeb, here's what happens when you put France at the hub of the wheel:

Social services and local government collapse. "Basic social services, schools, health services, agriculture, trade, everything's getting worse," Besida Tonwe of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told AFP.

Disease rises. "Illnesses that had been held in check are beginning to kill again and malnutrition, which was previously unthinkable in Ivory Coast, has reappeared."

Doctors vanish and hospitals close. "In the north and west about 80 percent of health services are said to be not functioning and four-fifths of staff had not returned to their posts one year after the crisis broke."

Epidemic diseases reemerge. "Measles, meningitis and cholera have reappeared."
600,000 people are displaced.
Refugees increase. 300,000 immigrant laborers flee the country. So do at least 50,000 Ivorians.
Schools fall into ruin. Schools are closed, looted, or overcrowded.
You get a bumper crop of orphans. The number of AIDS orphans is expected to rise from 420,000 to 720,000 next year.
But a famine in agriculture. "Agriculture and trade have likewise been hard hit with a slump in income, causing general impoverishment with all the predictable effects on nourishment and health of the population, say U.N. relief agencies, predicting a drop in next year's harvest."

France has been a conflicted leader in Ivory Coast. For one thing, France has a huge and growing Muslim population, and they're all on the side of the rebels — as the government discovered when it tried to arrest some of the rebel leaders in Paris, only to release them when Muslims in both Paris and the northern districts of Ivory Coast squawked. For another, the French method of "peacekeeping" is to put soldiers on the ground, concentrate them in a small area, then declare peace in the place where the soldiers are — but not where they aren't.

The French fiction is that they are working with the rebels and the government to move the country back to a minimum of security, but in fact the government in Ivory Coast is make-believe. Bremer's Iraqi governing council is the Court of the Sun King in comparison. Even Europe 1's Elkabbach had to ask, "If the French army leaves the Ivory Coast, how many minutes will the government survive?" The question sent Villepin into a fit of turbocharged platitudes.

Then, earlier this week, the rebel factions with whom France was supposed to be working had a falling out and, according to this report in Liberation, 23 people were killed in a provincial center when one group of rebels stormed a bank and others tried to move in on them. Le Monde carried the news that the incident might even cause France to consider peacekeeping in places where there is no peace.

Twenty-three people in one afternoon in a country that has supposedly been under the care of French-led U.N. peacekeepers for a year. If it had been a GI tripping over a landmine in Baghdad, it would be a "spiral of violence and terrorism." But where all you have is a Reuters and an AFP guy bumping into each other on a dash for cover, it's just another day in what Villepin called "the spirit of the Marcoussis accords." By "spirit" he means "ghost," because if last month was any indication, the U.N.'s mission in Ivory Coast is dead.

NOTES

Dead Man Talking. One more warning to the Tories, this one in today's Daily Telegraph, where Alice Thompson bids farewell, practically, to the clueless Iain Duncan Smith on the eve of the Conservative-party conference in Blackpool. "From his green boiled sweets to his manic laughter, he has not managed to convince the voters. We still don't know what he stands for: the vulnerable, Middle England, inner cities, the countryside? We know more about his passions for fishing and his father than his political views." Probably just as well. The Tories are the only party in the U.K. who could make electoral sense out of an anti-EU platform, but under Smith, they'll never figure it out.

The health of the Pope is on everyone's mind, as well as on the front pages of some European papers. The IHT carries Frank Bruno's New York Times piece , for example, quoting Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna as saying the pope was "approaching the last days and months of his life." The Frankfurter Allgemeine says the same thing, and so does the Corriere della Sera. If it's true, Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, shows no sign of it. The headline items there (.pdf alert!): a papal audience with the president of Lithuania, trouble in Baghdad, and a special report on the role of Christianity in the EU. Why? My guess is the OR knows we're all approaching the last days and months of our lives. You, me, Frank Bruno, and His Holiness. You have to pay attention.

Still looks like Bill Maher to me. Villepin's arrogance is beginning to irritate even the French. As Jon Vinocur happily explains in the IHT, Villepin and Chirac have alienated the U.S., most of Europe, and whatever remains of a French intelligentsia.

"At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants — or France merits," Vinocur writes, pointing to the growing popularity of books such as France in Free Fall, French Arrogance, and Ouest Contre Ouest. In that last book, Andre Glucksmann argues that the "central question of the future [is] not hegemony or multipolarity, the key French terms illustrating the Chirac government's seeming obsession about the United States and its desire to counter the Americans, but civilization versus nihilism, and whether the West together could make a fight to protect civilization."

The science of demographics. In France, the birth rate is lower than Jacques Chirac's popularity numbers, and politicians, worried about the impact on pension schemes, are in a sweat. But scientists have come up with a solution! According to Liberation, they've started cloning rats. Wrong rodent!

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