| February 4, 2003 | Tuesday | Zul Hijjah 2,1423 |
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A word or two about the Congress
Lessons from Vietnam
Why they hate Americans
Chirac under pressure
TO understand what happened to the financial sector in Pakistan during the period of President Ziaul Haq — which is the subject of today’s article — we must take a look at the progressive bureaucratization of the economy. This process was begun by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but brought to fruition by the Zia administration.
IN SPITE of opinion polls that show the overwhelming majority of the French opposed to a war with Iraq — with the most recent polls indicating that three out of four are against war — there is a growing pressure from corporate sector on Chirac government to reconsider its position.
“Bureaucrats in business,” a study published by the World Bank in 1995, arrived at a number of conclusions that surprised few practitioners of development. “Bureaucrats are still in business,” lamented the World Bank. This was the case despite more than a decade of divestiture efforts and the growing consensus that governments perform less well than the private sector in a host of activities. The World Bank found that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) accounted for nearly as large a share of developing countries in the mid-1990s as in the mid-1970s.
The Bank also discovered that the size of the SOE sector had diminished only in the former socialist economies and a few middle-income countries. In most developing countries, particularly the poorest, bureaucrats ran as large a share of the economy as ever. The bureaucrats were engaged in a variety of activities for which they were not well suited nor well trained. “Government employees operate a casino in Ghana, bake cookies in Egypt, assemble watches in India, mine salt in Mexico, make matches in Mali, and bottle cooking oil in Senegal,” reported the World Bank. “In many developing countries that continued to support large SOE sectors, inefficient state-owned firms generated deficits that hindered economic growth, making it more difficult for people to lift themselves out of poverty,” concluded the World Bank.
All this, of course, was also true for Pakistan. Following the spate of nationalizations carried out by the regime of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, civil servants were managing commercial and investment banks, insurance companies, cotton and rice trading corporations, and a host of industrial enterprises. There was a tremendous irony in the way Bhutto had implemented his programme of socializing the country’s economy. His programme extended the arm of the government to the sectors of the economy with which the bureaucrats were not familiar.
All this was done while the administration was busy in weakening the civil service, destroying its institutional base and making it totally beholden to politicians. In Pakistan, under Bhutto, a weakened and dispirited bureaucracy was given the task of running a variety of businesses. It is not surprising that the bureaucracy failed in this mission.
The bureaucracy staged a come-back during the Zia period. It did not reach the commanding heights it had occupied during the time of Ayub Khan but, under Zia, it gained a great deal of strength and salience. In this it was helped by the hold it now had over the part of the economy owned by the state.
Let us place Pakistan’s situation in perspective by looking at some numbers about the importance of the SOEs in the developing world. In 1978, one year after the military’s return to power, SOEs accounted for 9.4 per cent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product. This was slightly higher than the average for all developing countries (9.1 per cent), considerably higher than the average for Asian countries (8.8 per cent) but significantly lower than the average for all poor countries (11.3 per cent). What is interesting — and revealing — is the fact that this share increased in Pakistan under the rule of military’s second coming to 9.4 per cent in 1978-85. In the same period, the share of SOEs in GDP for all low-income developing countries also increased somewhat (to 12.4 per cent) but not as much as was the case for Pakistan.
The state-owned enterprises were much more active in the non-agricultural part of the economy in all developing countries, including Pakistan. For this part of the economy, these enterprises continued to increase their share in gross domestic product. In 1978, they accounted for 12 per cent of GDP but in 1978-85, their share increased by nearly 20 per cent, to 14.3 per cent. The state sectors onward march that had begun under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto continued unchecked during the administration headed by General Ziaul Haq.
The SOEs continued to do well in the late 1970s and early 1980s since they were allowed to claim an extraordinarily high share in domestic investment. In 1979, two years into the Zia period, the enterprises owned by the government accounted for nearly 53 per cent of gross domestic investment, more than four times their share in GDP. For the 1978-85 period, the government-owned entities were able to garner 35.8 per cent of gross domestic investment. The Pakistani state used a variety of resources — from the public sector as well as the private sectors of the economy — to provide financial resources to the SOEs.
These enterprises were funded directly from the budget. They were also provided resources by the numerous development finance corporations that operated in the country. They received finance from the commercial banks that were now under the control of the government. With the SOE sector in competition for national resources with the private sector, it is not surprising that the latter did so poorly in the 1970s and 1980s.
The only positive feature of the expansion of the state enterprises in the 1970s and 1980s was its relatively small dependence on external savings. In 1978, they accounted for less than four per cent of Pakistan’s total external debt. However, the average for 1979-85 increased somewhat to 4.6 per cent.
It is quite apparent from the way Pakistan’s four military presidents dealt with economic development that what matters more are the beliefs and the values of the man in power. Ayub Khan and General Pervez Musharraf were deeply interested in economic development and were personally involved in economic decision-making. Generals Yahya Khan and Ziaul Haq, on the other hand, delegated most responsibility for economic management to civil servants. M.M. Ahmad oversaw the economy under President Yahya while Ghulam Ishaq Khan was the economic czar under Ziaul Haq.
Had Ishaq Khan been so disposed, the military government that he served may have been inclined to privatize the enterprises over which the state had established its control during the Bhutto period. But the advice that was given to him extolled the virtues of the public sector. He was told that Pakistan had not been well served by the private sector. Private entrepreneurs had used government resources for personal advantage rather than for social gain. The government had to step in time and again to rescue failing, privately-owned, industries. Accordingly, Zia was advised that it was much better to let the government manage the economy than to place its trust in the private sector.
Multilateral development banks had also come to the conclusion in the 1980s that public sector management of some parts of the economy may not be undesirable provided the bureaucrats who ran state-owned businesses followed some well tested principles of management. They advised governments to subject public sector managers to greater competition and hard budget constraints. And they suggested that the bureaucrats who managed SOEs should have their compensation linked to performance.
In sum, the Zia administration stayed with the course the Bhutto administration had adopted. It made no attempt at divestiture and privatization. Scarce government resources continued to be committed to the expansion of the public sector, in particular in industry and finance. In fact, the increase in the power of the bureaucracy as the manager of the economy — at any rate, of the dozens of enterprises in the financial, industrial and commercial sectors that were of vital importance to the health of the economy — brought about a fusion among different sectors. This was dangerous since such a close association between industry and finance, with the bureaucracy in the driving seat, excluded the discipline of the market. The Zia administration could have achieved its goal of keeping some of the more strategic sectors if the economy under its control had it reformed the financial sector.
A well developed financial system plays a number of important roles that contribute to the successful operation of state-owned enterprises. An efficient financial sector allocates its resources to enterprises with high expected returns. The managers of financial institutions evaluate firms, managers, sectors, and business trends in order to choose the most promising and creditworthy ventures. In such a system, SOEs such as PIA, Wapda, the Sui Gas Companies, the Karachi Steel Mill, etc. will have to compete not only with one another but also with the enterprises in the private sector. The better the financial system is at obtaining and analyzing information the better the allocation of capital.
The financial sector raises capital from disparate savers through banks, insurance companies, pension funds, investment banks and capital markets. By accumulating these resources, financial institutions can raise funds for large SOEs and projects. A well developed financial system can also help improve corporate governance in the public sector. Managers of SOEs will take care to ensure that their enterprises are being run according to the expectations of the financial institutions from whom they have borrowed or obtained money.
While, during the Zia period, some attention was given to improving the working of non-financial SOEs, the financial sector remained unreformed. Consequently, its efficiency deteriorated. We made the point in an earlier article that the performance of the economy, including its rate of growth, depends to a considerable extent on the efficiency of the financial sector. If what we have said above about the working of the financial system during the Zia years is correct, then how do we account for the high rates of growth during this period? The economy expanded by more than six per cent a year, a rate of growth similar to that of the Ayub era.
This question has an easy answer. The growth rate during the Zia years was almost entirely the consequence of large inflows of foreign capital, both as remittances sent by the Pakistanis working abroad and also the generous assistance provided by the United States to compensate Pakistan for the help it was then providing in Afghanistan.
The financial sector had little to do with the high rate of GDP growth. The full impact of the neglect of the financial sector was felt in the 1990s, the period we will cover next week.
THE Congress lost control of its political fortunes when it lost control of two words and a phrase in the second half of the eighties. Since it has made no attempt to find what it has lost, it is still adrift.
Mahatma Gandhi fashioned the essential dialectic of the Congress movement (as distinct from the freedom struggle) around the concept of ‘Ram Rajya’. Ram Rajya was not ‘soft Hindutva’, a charge that was, incidentally, made against it by the Muslim League. It was a symbol that was romantic and inclusive. Independence was an eclectic idea for the peasant, who had suffered economic bondage by several layers of masters; and meaningless to groups like the untouchables who were the victims of a vicious and humiliating slavery.
The fight against the British could gather momentum only if there was something better on the horizon. Ram Rajya was a definition of this vision, an elemental part of every Hindu’s dream world. There were many specific kinds of freedom in Ram Rajya: freedom from hunger; freedom of faith; and perhaps most important, freedom from injustice. Freedom was quantified; freedom was made flesh, as it were. The peasant had to have faith in Gandhi, and the Congress under Pandit Nehru would usher in Ram Rajya. Gandhi gave the Congress property rights over Ram Rajya, while making Nehru chief custodian of the dream.
Gandhi sought to solve the two critical barriers to mass mobilization through two words. Secularism was the term generated, a trifle artificially, to denote a civilized relationship between Hindus and Muslims. The original meaning of secular is as an opposite of the clergy; this was honed in India to mean a relationship between communities that was above or beyond their faith. Secularism became a concept closer to religious tolerance, an ideal that allowed every Indian community to worship its god however it wanted to, and find space for any difference. Non-violence offered a parallel protection, for it excluded civil war from options, at least in theory.
The second Gandhian word, and this one was a complete, and original invention, was Harijan. Gandhi was certain that India would never be able to move forward unless it uprooted this evil. To be credible, Ram Rajya would have to release this quarter of the population from the status of pack animals. And thus was the untouchable transformed into a Harijan; the unclean were renominated ‘the children of god’.
The redoubtable Lal Krishna Advani neatly sliced Ram Rajya off the Congress matrix by including a Ram temple at Ayodhya within this revised kingdom. Under Advani’s ambidextrous leadership, the BJP evolved into the custodian of Lord Rama’s India. The party deliberately treated Gandhi with kid gloves, because it knew how effectively Gandhi had used Hindu imagery for a secular purpose. The party also realized that it had been hurt badly by association with Nathuram Godse, for the Mahatma had become an icon of sacrifice and piety in public life; if it could not inherit the Gandhian mantle, it could at least choose not to sully it further.
In the meantime, the Congress showed every sign of taking its Gandhian inheritance for granted. Lip service was the best that the Mahatma got. For the rising Doon School generation around Rajiv Gandhi, the older Gandhi was a public necessity but a private bore.
Advani also pulped secularism at the same time. A mistake by Rajiv Gandhi permitted him to do so. Rajiv succumbed to pressure by Muslim fundamentalists like Shahabuddin and used the power of parliament and executive authority to reverse a court judgment that gave relief to a Muslim divorcee called Shah Bano. He permitted a Muslim minister in his cabinet to abuse the judiciary in parliament while liberal India watched aghast. Advani was too sharp a politician to let Rajiv Gandhi escape.
But Advani’s real target was larger than a prime minister or even a party; he went for the jugular, and revised the meaning of secularism. He made the word synonymous with appeasement. From a positive word that had helped define the majority-minority relationship, it became a negative term that invited ridicule. Deftly, Advani reversed a key element of the Gandhian dialectic, taking care all the while not to besmirch the icon himself.
Simultaneously, from another direction, the third leg of the Gandhian legacy was being sawn off. The carpenters this time were Kanshi Ram and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party. They challenged ‘Harijan’. They told yesterday’s untouchables that they had been cheated by a false promise. India had not made them children of any god; India was still in the throes of a caste system that kept them imprisoned, and these shackles would be broken not by patronage from duplicitous Congress leaders, but the strength of their unity, mobilization and challenge.
They could empower themselves through the democratic system if they understood their strength. They had to recognize that they were Dalits, the oppressed; the Congress could take its hypocritical lollipops elsewhere. They banned the use of Harijan from political terminology, and such is their success that no Congress leader now dares to use a term that Gandhi invented. Harijan has become synonymous with betrayal.
The Congress has found no answers. It might be correct to say that it has not even debated the questions, leave alone trying to find answers. It is unsurprising therefore that it no longer exists in areas where its electoral base depended on support from the Harijans that Gandhi brought to its fold. The charge of appeasement, and the dynamics of the temple movement, shifted the upper caste Hindu vote away; the charge of betrayal took out the Harijan/Dalits; and the Muslims, who need allies within the demographic mix, moved to leaders who could fulfil this need, like Laloo Prasad Yadav.
The party survives where it does for what might be called non-ideological reasons - in a state, for instance, where there are only two principal parties, and where anti-incumbency can bring its rewards. But anti-incumbency is an insubstantial motive. The Congress is no longer propelled by electorates that are committed to the party because it believes in and represents their interests. It wanes and waxes in proportion to the public sympathy that exists for the Congress’ opponents. It might win in Assam, for instance, but only because Prafulla Mahanta and the AGP have become unpopular. But where others have moved in to win sections of the old Congress vote, the party has become irrelevant.
The evidence shows that where the Congress has been marginalized it has never managed to recover lost ground. Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are the outstanding examples. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have joined this list. In more than 200 Lok Sabha seats, therefore, the Congress is simply not in the picture; and in all the states where it is ruling its share of seats is going to depreciate sharply. It is too early to predict what will happen in a general election a year and a half down the line, but if the polls were to be held today the Congress tally would not enter three figures.
All this has been evident for some time, but the party leadership is either indifferent, or led into self-delusion. At the very least it should have begun the process of alliance-building five years ago. But the culture of coalition-building is alien to the party. Individual loyalty to its leadership is more important than creating a platform on which more than one voice can be heard. Moreover, in another smart move, the BJP has co-opted the one party that could have provided essential ballast to any coalition against the NDA.
The Bahujan Samaj Party has probably the most committed vote outside the BJP. For more than one reason, the BSP should have been wooed by the Congress.
It was not, and it is now an ally of the BJP. If the BJP and the BSP contest the elections in Uttar Pradesh together, sharing seats by mutual agreement, they will sweep the largest state in the country.
This makes it all the more necessary that the non-Congress parties outside the ruling alliance come together. But these parties are either too small, or too driven by maverick egos, to unite. There is nothing that prevents Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav from being in the same party except their individual need to be supreme. It is a strange, inexplicable and illogical route towards suicide, but then suicide is not the preferred option of those who are sensible, rational and logical.
It took decades for the Congress to become a national party; it will take time for the party to vacate the space that was built by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and their successors, up to Indira Gandhi. Nor is a decline inevitable. But to reverse a decline needs greater courage than the party has. It must start by recognizing reality, and then articulating it, and then formulating the processes by which fresh momentum can be induced. It must go back to believing in the people, rather than believing in just a leader.
The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi
ROBERT S.McNamara was to the Vietnam war what Donald Rumsfeld is to the coming Iraq War. He was close enough to President Kennedy and Johnson to be their alter-ego. He was counted among the ‘best and the brightest.’
Long after the war in Vietnam ended, he felt the need to unburden himself. He wrote a book, In Retrospect which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described as “brave, honest, honourable” and Lt.Gen. Robert E. Pursley (USAF, retired) advised that the book “should be read and carried throughout their careers by every current and future military officer for decades to come.” The book was published in 1995, some eight years ago so that there are still many decades to go for “current and future military officers” to absorb “the errors of judgment.”
In the preface to the book, Robert S. McNamara writes: “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”
I read In Retrospect when it first came out and wrote a column about it saying the book was a kind of mea culpa. I have re-read it, to find any clues to understand what is happening today. Change the name of the enemy and there is the same high moral purpose, the same reliance on perceptions, the half-truths, the almost-truths, the same, concocted threats to national security and most of all, the insistence that there is a ‘just war.’ We are angels, they are the devils.
The United States never declared war in Vietnam. The closest it came was through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed by Congress and Johnson invoked the resolution to justify the constitutionality of the military action, 16,000 military advisers expanding to 550,000 combat troops almost overnight. McNamara expresses an unease about the naval incidents that occurred in the Tonkin Gulf but there is evidence to suggest that the incidents were either fabricated or had been deliberately provoked. And the rest, as they say, is history.
McNamara’s is an honest book but he offers no apologies to the Vietnamese people, three million who were killed through “errors of judgment.” Nor is there any mention of the use of chemical weapons, Agent Orange.
Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award. It is another book that I have re-read. About Agent Orange he writes: “The planes dropped more than bombs. In 1966 specially equipped C-123 transports of Operation Ranch Hand destroyed nearly 850,00 acres of forest and crops by spraying them with chemical herbicides, also called defoliants. The spraying had begun in the early 1960s as another of John Kennedy’s mistakes, urged on him by Diem in his cruelty and McNamara in his search for technological solutions.
With the arrival of the US armed forces in 1965 the defoliation had, like everything else, expanded geometrically. By 1967, 1.5 million acres of forest and crops were being destroyed in an effort to deny the Communist soldiers food and places to hide.” Neil Sheehan claims that after the war, scientific tests indicated that the Vietnamese of the south had levels of dioxin in their bodies three times higher than inhabitants of the United States.
Does any of this have relevance to the imminent threat of war in Iraq? It could if one was prepared to learn any lessons from it. The most vital lesson is that you don’t win hearts of the people by bombing them. In the beginning, the Vietcong was a small band of guerillas but as the war intensified, their numbers grew and there was a lot of support for them among the people. This support started as a trickle and became a stream. The stream became a river and the river became a flood.
Neil Sheehan quotes a two-star general telling Ellsberg: “The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm... till the other side cracks and gives up.” It didn’t happen the way the general said it would.
No sane man would want to see weapons of mass destruction in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein. Equally, no sane person would like to see weapons of mass destruction in the hands of someone like Ariel Sharon. In his speech at Davos, Colin Powell made a reference to “God’s children.” “God’s children” embraces us all, white and black and brown, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, embraces Americans and Iraqis. And in the end, what matters most is the value we attach to human lives. And we need to ask ourselves: Is there any possession more valuable than human life? If there is, then let’s go and bomb each other to hell.
HATING Americans is a global sport. It’s played in every country in the world.
Years ago I was in London and I placed an advertisement in the classifieds, which read as follows: “Would like to hear from people who dislike Americans and their reasons why.”
I didn’t sign it, so people assumed I was English. The response was unbelievable.
One gentleman wrote, “They stole all our women with chocolates and nylons.”
Another said, “I was in Bombay in 1934 and these American sailors came in the bar and picked a fight with us and wrecked the bar.”
A third letter said, “They talk too loud.”
Another said, “They don’t speak correct English and don’t like tea.”
A lady wrote, “I was in love with an American soldier and he promised to take me back to America. I never heard from him again.”
One writer turned out to be pro-American. He wrote, “Shame on you. You’re just a troublemaker. If the Yankees hadn’t come over, we may have lost the war.”
I received over 300 letters in response to my ad. My favourite came from a London newspaper editor who said, “Please contact us. There may be a story here.”
All the time I lived in Paris, from 1949 to 1962, pro-American feeling was high. In every country where I travelled, Americans were treated well. If you talked to people behind the Iron Curtain, and they thought no one was listening, they told you how much they admired the United States. Only members of the Communist Party thought otherwise.
What was the reason for the pro-American feeling then? The main one, of course, was that we possessed American Express traveller’s cheques. Secondly, we gave aid and comfort to the European countries with the Marshall Plan.
The people were so happy to have us they didn’t even get upset when we didn’t speak the language. Of course, there were some who called us “Ugly Americans,” but we couldn’t be responsible for a few bad apples.
Sadly, the US has squandered all its goodwill. There are people who not only dislike Americans, they hate them. They are afraid President Bush and his friends are going to have their way whether he has Security Council support or not.
One Frenchman said, “I didn’t vote for Bush and neither did Chirac.”
I spoke to an English friend on the phone who said, “He wants to start a new empire.”
I would hate to think what would happen if I ran the same ad now in the London Times that I ran in the ‘50s. Despite Prime Minister Blair, I think the mail would be very anti-American.
No one wants to be hated. Maybe once the war is over, if there is one, everyone will be pro-American again.—Dawn/ Tribune Media Services
The apprehensions are that opposition to war could eventually result in France being deprived of important defence and construction contracts if ever a war is declared, and won, under the leadership of the United States and Britain.
France has repeatedly stated since last fall when it was one of the principal architects of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 that war against Iraq can be authorized only through a new resolution by the Security Council, and that it behoves Iraq to come clean with United Nations inspectors who should, France is now saying, be accorded more time to be able to thoroughly carry out their investigation. President Jacques Chirac, probably the most consistent and forceful voice opposing war in France, has himself indicated in recent weeks that “war should remain, let us not forget, nothing but a last resort.”
Nevertheless, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking the other day at Davos, did let it be understood that the United States, if necessary, could very well decide to go to war unilaterally, and not await a green signal from the Security Council. Mr Powell also indicated that several other countries — without naming them — were prepared to go to war on the side of the United States.
French daily Le Figaro, which is controlled by the family of Serge Dassault, chairman of Groupe Dassault and one of the kingpins of the French military-industrial complex, who is probably best-known as the manufacturer of the Mirage and Rafale jets, has in recent days been increasingly relaying growing opposition to Mr Chirac’s position which, says Le Figaro, definitely exists in French political and military circles. The newspaper has repeatedly quoted French military officials as noting that France may very well be making a mistake in sticking to a position which is described as being hardly realistic.
The daily quotes French military officials who, it says, are “calling into question” France’s opposition to participation in a US-led coalition. One “superior army officer” quoted by Le Figaro goes so far as to suggest that in not wanting to go to war, “the French army might be considered as indicating that it just does not have the means to do so, and that if it were to participate in a war, it would have to do so symbolically, which is why it might be perceived preferring to abstain.” Other officials say that “we should really take part in a war effort if only because it would give some ‘punch’ to our military and accredit the idea that we remain a major European power.”
In a story appearing in the Jan. 27 issue of Le Figaro, its author Luc de Barochez notes that in maintaining its anti-war position, France “has a lot to lose” and especially risks further exacerbating its traditional ties of friendship with Washington which, he notes, “could consider that its ‘strategic’ contract with France has been broken.” In which case, he adds, “France would risk being excluded not only from a major western military operation, but also important commercial and petroleum-related ‘perspectives’ in an Iraq to be reconstructed.” Moreover, he notes, “on a larger basis, its (France’s) continued ability to have its say in the affairs of the Middle East might very well be affected.”
But having said that, admits Mr de Barochez, in maintaining its opposition to a unilateral US-led war against Saddam Hussein, France “is far from being isolated (on the question). She does dispose of influential allies in the Security Council, notably Russia and China. Her position, moreover, is shared by several countries in Europe. But then, with regard to the United States, the bridges would admittedly be difficult to reconstruct.”
The issue of whether it might not be in France’s best interest to put aside its principles and think of pledging itself before it is too late to the US-led war effort resulted in a heated exchange during the Jan. 30 daily press briefing at the French foreign affairs ministry.
The dialogue — which some characterized as being ‘of the deaf’ — between official spokesman Francois Rivasseau and some of the journalists allowed the French government to let it be known loud and clear that even if France did not take part in an allied war against Iraq, it still expected to play a role in the post-war reconstruction of the country as well as have its own say on a post-war political settlement. “It’s a situation,” said the Quai d’Orsay spokesman, that is “unavoidable.”
The spokesman, badgered by journalists who wanted to know whether France might be considering changing its position on taking part in an allied attack on Iraq, let it be known that “as far as we are concerned, we are still in a period of inspection (by Hans Blix and his UN inspection team), and that it is on such things that we are now concentrating our attention and our efforts.”
Reflecting another point of view that holds that France is holding back its participation in a war simply because it is not equipped militarily to take part in an allied attack on Iraq — and this because it has had to provide more than 2,000 troops to the Cote d’Ivoire alone — the foreign ministry spokesman, Francois Rivasseau, simply referred journalists to the French defence ministry as being “in a better position to provide an answer.”
And, with regard to a question as to whether France, if it did not take part in the war effort, might be kept out not only of the formulation of the post-war political settlement for Iraq, but would not also qualify for contracts that would evidently be awarded to companies belonging to the countries (e.g., the United States and Britain) that would have taken part in the war, the Quai d’Orsay spokesman noted that “the presence of France, as of all the international community, would be evidently unavoidable,” adding that “such a position is not of the order of wishful thinking, it is a reality, an evident fact.”
Finally, asked point blank by one journalist as to “how can France dare speak of ‘winning the peace,’ especially when it keeps its distance from the conflict?,” the spokesman noted that “winning the peace does not necessarily mean having to go to war. This is what have been stressing, on all our partners, notably in the Security Council.”
The writer is a former teacher at the Harvard University, and now Dawn’s correspondent in Paris.