Stardate 20030205.1507

(On Screen): In the aftermath of Powell's speech, the government of France continues to oppose war in Iraq. This was probably the best chance they had to change sides suffering the least damage to their reputation, but it was going to hurt anyway. Regardless, they have not done so and still oppose war. Their alternative? Increase the number of inspectors, because the inspections have been working.

France maintained its opposition to war against Iraq despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, instead proposing that weapons inspections be strengthened.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin suggested tripling the number of inspectors and placing a full-time monitor in Baghdad to oversee the process.

"The use of force can only be a final recourse," de Villepin told a special U.N. Security Council session attended by 12 other foreign ministers. "We must move on to a new stage and further strengthen the inspections."

De Villepin said France would carefully review the evidence provided by Powell, but he emphasized that inspections were working and had resulted in major achievements.

Still, he acknowledged there was more Iraq could do to cooperate with a beefed-up inspections regime to avert war.

"Given the choice between military intervention and an inspections regime which is inadequate because of a failure to operate on Iraq's part, we must choose the decisive reinforcement of the means of inspection. This is today what France is proposing."

The claim that the inspections are "working" is ludicrous on the face of it, since Res 1441 set the definition of "working" as "Iraq telling the inspectors honestly where everything is so the inspectors can find them", and it's blatantly obvious now that this has not happened. Increasing the number of inspectors won't change that, unless you have maybe 500 times as many inspectors, all armed (i.e. an invasion force).

So I called Engineering and asked them if they'd finished recalibrating the sub-space crystal ball. They claim to have done so, so let's test it out and see what it says is happening, shall we?

What I think is going on is that the government of France no longer thinks it can prevent war, so they're trying to establish themselves to take advantage of some of what will happen in the aftermath. In particular, France will have established itself as the biggest and most important "great power" to steadfastly oppose the US, and thus will be uniquely placed to benefit from any anti-American world backlash which takes place in the coming months. Which is why I think that if there is another UNSC resolution proposed, France will veto it.

It comes down to an analysis of risks and rewards, and I seriously considered three major possibilities for the underlying French motivation. First, there was stupidity and arrogance and what amounted to institutional insanity, which led to a belief that France actually is still important. I reject that: Chirac and the bureaucracy which supports him may be vile weasels, but I don't think they're delusional.

What that left was either that they still hope against hope to prevent war, or that they accept war as being inevitable and are trying to place themselves to benefit as much as possible from the aftermath.

I'm willing to take a lot greater risks with much less chance of success in order to avoid being shot in the morning than I am to avoid having to pay a $100 fine. If we think that France still hopes to prevent war, then as they continue to try doing so as the odds against success continue to lengthen, then it means that the catastrophe they are trying to prevent must be ever larger for the calculation to make any sense. So I sat down and tried to make a list of what I thought the government of France feared in the event of war:

Loss of revenue from being the primary operator of the oil-side of the "Oil for Food" program.
Loss of future revenue when sweetheart deals with Iraq for future oil development become moot
Fear of rising American influence in the region
Fear of rising American influence worldwide
Fear of crushing American military victory, clearly demonstrating US military preeminence
Fear of explosive uprising of French Muslim immigrants
American success would threaten progress to post-national world government

Of these, the money and the Muslims are the most important by far. Management of the current oil program is worth a great deal of money to France, and the deals they've made with Iraq for future development are potentially worth tens of billions of euros. Given the perilous state of the French economy now, this could be seen as critical. And the potential for really serious unrest in France itself is a non-trivial concern.

I remain convinced that this is not sufficient to justify pursuing ever fainter possibilities of preventing war. When last I considered this I proposed the possibility that they were concealing evidence of French companies violating the sanctions and selling war matériel to Iraq and were afraid that they would be severely damaged if it came out. But at this point, given the basic apathy of French voters about that kind of thing, it would require France to be deliberately encouraging Iraq to develop nuclear weapons for that to be sufficient grave to justify this. I don't think that's what's going on any longer. I do think that there will be embarassment after the war, but I don't think that's the motivation.

Some of what's going on is that France is now hoist by its own petard; they've gotten themselves into a jam through past policies and don't really have any good paths going forward. Up until now, they've been posturing anti-American to a great extent as a form of power-play in the EU to try to dominate it, but that's all come crashing down in the last week. And when it still seemed as if there was a non-negligible chance of preventing war, then the arguments above would have been persuasive. But they rode the horse too long, and now they're stuck.

Looking forward, persisting in their opposition risks destroying NATO, making the UN meaningless, and potentially wrecking the current process towards formation of the EU. But in practice most of that damage has already been done from France's point of view.

NATO effectively is dead anyway. With the vast majority of the effective military force of NATO being American and British, and with no clear mission and little internal unity, it isn't clear that NATO means anything anyway. Last year's symbolic and ultimately useless invocation of Article V, and the recent refusal to deploy NATO forces to protect Turkey, mean that it's over.

But even if NATO could somehow be resurrected, French influence in the body would be shattered and thus for French purposes it would be useless. Saving NATO at this point would not benefit France.

The same is true of the UN. From the French point of view, a dead UN and one which is still twitching where France has little practical influence are essentially the same. If despite everything the UN now rubberstamps American plans, then it means that it has ceased to be a place where France can still attempt to wield substantial influence and where its pronouncements can't easily be ignored. The UN only is useful to France if it gives France the ability to prevent America from doing things; once that is not possible the UN no longer has any value to France. The damage has already been done there, too.

Likewise, in the last week French plans to dominate the EU were shredded by the "gang of 8" backlash (later joined by other nations who were either EU members or candidates) while support for France was minimal. The process of formation of the EU may well proceed, but France will not dominate it and it probably won't take the form that France wants. A British/Italian/Spanish dominated EU which is pro-American is worse than useless to France; it might even repudiate socialism.

If the French government were to change sides now, after all its proclamations opposing war, it would become an international laughingstock diplomatically, and its worldwide diplomatic influence, small as it already is, would plummet. France is still trying to play a grand game and trying to pretend that it is a "great power"; a French capitulation at this point would reduce France to the same diplomatic position as Spain or Denmark, well below the influence of the UK and totally eclipsed by the US.

And French relations with the US are already irretrievably poisoned; a change of position now would have little effect on that. Which means that the chance of France actually retaining its sweetheart oil deals in Iraq are now nil. I do not think that they're holding out in hopes of being bought off by a promise to honor those contracts.

So in practice it turns out that there's little for France to gain any longer by changing sides and ceasing to obstruct the course of events in the UNSC. The window for that closed a long time ago. Changing sides now would discredit them but gain them nothing.

But if they continue as they have, then they would be uniquely placed afterwards to capitalize on any of several possible future trends. First and most important, they would be well placed to capitalize on any anti-American backlash afterwards, and well placed to become the de facto leader of any potential coalition of nations which might result.

Second is that if the war does not go well, France would be in a position to say "I told you so." The war would then weaken the US and especially the UK, and France would be the main beneficiary, with concomitant rises in influence worldwide and especially within Europe.

Given that this is primarily a matter of perception, it's very likely that no matter how well the war actually goes, in terms of casualties to everyone and in terms of physical damage, they'll try to claim that it was excessively brutal and incompetently run and unnecessarily destructive, in hopes of gaining exactly this benefit. (We've seen exactly those claims about Afghanistan.) There is a chance they might try to indict Bush as a war criminal under some of the more esoteric rules of the ICC. Which would instantly destroy the ICC, but just as with the UN, if the ICC can't be used against the US then it is useless to France anyway. (This would sound completely farfetched except for the fact that someone is already threatening to do the same thing to Tony Blair.)

These are not very good prospects, but France is already beyond the point of no return for actually avoiding serious damage if it changes sides. Giving in now means moving to the upper benches and watching the Americans and British play for the next 20 years. Continuing to oppose us gives them at least a chance of continuing to be influential world wide.