[GOANET] Interesting NYTimes article about France & India.

[Nagesh Bhatcar]

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Vote France Off the Island

February 9, 2003
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the
U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting
five for the N.B.A. All-Star team - with a vote by the
fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council
and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be
Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's
more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's
biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the
world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly,
India is just so much more serious than France these days.
France is so caught up with its need to differentiate
itself from America to feel important, it's become silly.
India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent
about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence
honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed
since the end of the cold war. India can.

Throughout the cold war, France sought to differentiate
itself by playing between the Soviet and American blocs.
France could get away with this entertaining little game
for two reasons: first, it knew that Uncle Sam, in the end,
would always protect it from the Soviet bear. So France
could tweak America's beak, do business with Iraq and enjoy
America's military protection. And second, the cold war
world was, we now realize, a much more stable place.
Although it was divided between two nuclear superpowers,
both were status quo powers in their own way. They
represented different orders, but they both represented
order.

That is now gone. Today's world is also divided, but it is
increasingly divided between the "World of Order" -
anchored by America, the E.U., Russia, India, China and
Japan, and joined by scores of smaller nations - and the
"World of Disorder." The World of Disorder is dominated by
rogue regimes like Iraq's and North Korea's and the various
global terrorist networks that feed off the troubled string
of states stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia.

How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is
the key question of the day. There is room for
disagreement. There is no room for a lack of seriousness.
And the whole French game on Iraq, spearheaded by its
diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin,
lacks seriousness. Most of France's energy is devoted to
holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam
Hussein's feet to the fire to comply with the U.N.

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections
have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam
has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple
the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed
not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed
because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as
the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a
thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by
tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be
faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam's government
pass "legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of
mass destruction." (I am not making this up.) That proposal
alone is a reminder of why, if America didn't exist and
Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be
speaking either German or Russian.

I also want to avoid a war - but not by letting Saddam off
the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back the
winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen the World
of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce Saddam into
compliance - without a war - is for the whole world to line
up shoulder-to-shoulder against his misbehavior, without
any gaps. But France, as they say in kindergarten, does not
play well with others. If you line up against Saddam you're
just one of the gang. If you hold out against America,
you're unique. "France, it seems, would rather be more
important in a world of chaos than less important in a
world of order," says the foreign policy expert Michael
Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World."


If France were serious about its own position, it would
join the U.S. in setting a deadline for Iraq to comply, and
backing it up with a second U.N. resolution authorizing
force if Iraq does not. And France would send its prime
minister to Iraq to tell that directly to Saddam. Oh,
France's prime minister was on the road last week. He was
out drumming up business for French companies in the
world's biggest emerging computer society. He was in
India.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company





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