September 6, 2003	Saturday	Rajab 8, 1424

PARIS: What is French for “I told you so?”

With the United States swallowing its pride to seek help sorting out the postwar debacle in Iraq, France and fellow “Old Europe” opponents of the conflict can barely resist gloating.

“So the ‘Frenchies’ were cowardly, ungrateful, naive, petty and self-seeking, were they?” asked veteran French commentator Regis Debray on Friday.

“If you like. But at least they judged it right,” he wrote in the daily Le Figaro, catching the mood of grim satisfaction among many in a country where up to 90 per cent firmly supported President Jacques Chirac’s stance against the war.

Chirac bet that even if the United States could win the war, it would need others to win the peace. Washington’s call to the United Nations to help end the guerrilla violence plaguing Iraq suggests he was right.

Not one peep of schadenfreude (German for taking pleasure in people’s woes) will be heard in public from Chirac’s administration. It has insisted all along that it is in no one’s interest for Iraq to descend into anarchy and become a base for terrorists.

But with memories of anti-French insults like “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” flying across the Atlantic a few months back, France is in no mood to send its soldiers into the fray without having a strong say in Iraq’s future.

“The attacks they fired against us will rebound back on them,” said historian Jacques Julliard about the right-wingers in the Bush administration widely seen in France as encouraging an anti-French US media campaign.

Many French people looked on in disbelief earlier this year as US restaurants re-named French fries “freedom fries” and consumers were urged to boycott Bordeaux wines, Camembert cheese and luxury goods from Paris.

Washington vowed that France, whose veto in the UN Security Council made it the natural leader of the anti-war lobby, would face punishment for its conduct.

Far from dealing out punishment, the United States may have to offer sweeteners to France and other anti-war allies like Germany and Russia to win support for its draft UN resolution.

Signalling on Thursday that France was in no hurry to join up to a peace effort still dominated by the United States, Chirac said the current draft was “quite far off” Paris’s goal of a speedy return to Iraqi self-government.

French opinion alone requires that Chirac play a strong hand in the wrangling. A poll of 8,000 Americans and Europeans released on Thursday showed 70 per cent of the French have no faith in US global leadership, Europe’s highest disapproval rate.

Pressure on the United States to sort out Iraq fast gives France the upper hand in negotiations ahead of a key UN General Assembly meeting on September 23, said Gustav Lindstrom, a Paris-based specialist on transatlantic relations.

“But France and Germany have realised there is support for the resolution from other European centres. They do not want to be blamed for stalling the process. They will be very careful not to break it off,” Lindstrom, of the Institute of Security Studies, said.

France has already set out its demands, calling for a fast transfer of power to a provisional Iraqi government and for security to be handed to an international UN-mandated force.

It will also want to ensure that any spoils from the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy and its lucrative oil sector are fairly shared out.—Reuters