Stardate 20030208.1516

(On Screen): I have to give the French government credit. Its new proposal regarding Iraq is a credible diplomatic threat. It's not actually a credible plan, in the sense of actually having any chance of disarming Iraq, but I don't think it is intended to be one.

Until now, the French and the others in the UN and around the world who have opposed war have been in the position of not having any alternative to propose which was even faintly plausible. Their previous position was "Let the inspections work" but we gave that a try, and Powell's speech before the UN made clear that it not only failed but in fact cannot reasonably be expected to succeed. So for anyone to continue to oppose war, based on the underlying philosophy that "war is the last resort; we need to explore other alternatives first" (which is what Chirac keeps saying, not that he actually believes it) then they needed another alternative to propose, and this is it.

What this does is to provide diplomatic cover for anyone in the UNSC who wants to vote against any Anglo-American resolution to authorize war. Instead of being painted as anti-American and supportive of a brutal dictator they can now say that they oppose war because we need to try this other peaceful alternative first.

Werner (whose email address didn't work when I tried to respond to him) writes:

I wonder what you think about the new French-German peace plan that has just been announced. According to "Der Spiegel", both governments have been working on this since the beginning of the year and are now trying to get the Russians and Chinese on board. It´s called Mirage, reportedly.

The details in short:
- "Peaceful invasion" of Iraq by thousands of armed UN troops who will protect the inspectors
- Number of Inspectors will be tripled and they will be supported by recon aircraft
- Iraq will be declared a no fly zone
- Iraq will be disarmed in a massive "housesearch"
- Saddam will remain nominally in power
- If the regime is weakened and implodes as a result of this, it´s considered a bonus
- Export controls and sanctions will play a vital part
- Regime change is not the primary aim of this
- Even Germany may send some UN troops
Of course, Saddam might just take them all as hostages. Therefore the US are supposed to keep 200.000 troops stationed around Iraq as a permanent threat.The whole thing is supposed to last years, possibly. Sounds like TotalFinaElf wants to take over Iraq with American help.

I think the whole thing is more likely to cause unrest and civil war in Iraq than outright US occupation.

The problem is that America may find it hard to say no to something like that. It sounds plausible. Maybe the French have already informed Saddam about their plan to keep him in power. What if he plays along?

This will probably cost me some sleep...

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 gunfir