Stardate 20030313.1337

(On Screen): I'm beginning to see the vague outlines of a victory forming here in the diplomatic maneuvering, and I think Chirac just got snookered. I'm not sure, and much can change in the course of the next couple of days, but I think that we just got a partial victory in the diplomatic struggle. I think it's enough.

The competition has been between the Anglo-American alliance and the Franco-German "Axis of Weasels". On the Weasel side, Chirac is the leader and Schröder is in a position of supporting Chirac as a "me, too". That's inherent in the fact that France has a veto in the UNSC, and Germany doesn't, but it's also because Chirac and the French seem to have much more commitment to this, as well as because Schröder is extremely weak inside Germany. On our side, the British and Americans are more or less equal partners diplomatically, though Bush has been letting the British lead in part because Blair has more at stake. Each side also has other nations aligned with it (e.g. Belgium with the French, Spain and Australia with us) who are important in other ways but who have much less influence on the diplomatic interplay.

It's important to make clear what the issue really is. This isn't about whether there's going to be war in Iraq; that's beyond dispute. We are going to attack; we're going to win. Everyone knows it. Equally, there's no way that the UNSC will formally approve a new resolution to authorize that war, which means that when we do so, the UN will be finished as an important international body. So none of the wrangling is about those issues.

What the struggle really has been about is who's going to be blamed for destroying the UN, and who will politically dominate the EU. The French are trying to set us up for killing the UN. They want both the US and UK to take the blame. That's because the French are trying to create the European Union as a diplomatic and economic power opposed to the US, which is sufficiently big to actually represent a "counterweight" to the US, because they fear our currently-unmatched economic and political and military power. The French are deeply nervous about a unipolar world; they want to unite Europe against the US. Thus they need to demonize America in the minds of Europeans so that the new EU, once it comes online, will oppose America and try to limit it. The EU won't really satisfy the French if it ends up being really friendly to and supportive of the US; all that will do is to make the single pole in the unipolar world all the stronger.

They also need to take the British down because they see the British as the biggest obstacle to the creation of the EU in France's image, not only in terms of foreign policy but in other ways. There are other things going on, too, and some of them we may not actually know about yet. But this seems to be the primary motivation. The struggle in the UN now is not, in fact, really about Iraq at all. The French do not see Iraq as a threat to France even if it does get nuclear weapons; they're far more afraid of the US and are using this as a way of weakening the US, both directly and indirectly.

The Brits and Yanks are actually concerned about Saddam himself. But there's also the struggle for power in Europe, and what we've been trying to do is to set the French up to take the fall for destroying the UN. The basic strategy is to try to make clear that the refusal of the UN to authorize war against Iraq isn't based on any kind of rational calculation of the historical record of Iraq's non-compliance with UN resolutions, or with the apparent danger that Saddam represents to the people of Iraq, to the nations nearby, and to us. If the UN doesn't actually base its decisions on the merit of the case, then the entire idea of letting the UN be the final adjudicator and authorizer for war becomes ludicrous. So the point was to try to create a situation where France would veto the final resolution even though no rational person in the US and UK, not to mention elsewhere in the world, could avoid the conclusion that their decision had nothing to do with the real issues.

Which means that we have not really been playing Poker. We haven't been playing Chess. What we've really been playing is Old Maid. The UN is doomed; but who gets stuck with the blame?

The Anglo-American strategy, mainly being driven by the British, was to get a resolution passed giving Iraq one final chance to fully disarm, with inspections, and so on (i.e. Res 1441) and when Iraq didn't actually do so, to demand authorization for war. Either we get it, because France wimps out and loses face, or we don't and the UN is history, and France gets the blame for it. Both ways, we eliminate Saddam and reduce French influence in Europe.

In the last two weeks, with the Res 1441 charade now complete and Iraq not having truly committed to disarm, the final act was played out. We introduced one final resolution which simply said that Iraq had not availed itself of the final chance to disarm. Then both sides began to posture, to threaten, and to try to woo the other voters in the Security Council.

Sometimes in negotiations when you try to issue a conditional threat, of the form "If you do this I'll do that", the other guy may not believe you. You're trying to dissuade him from what he says he'll do by your thread of negative consequences, but if he proceeds anyway, then about all you can do is to try to make your threat even more emphatic. So the UK and US wanted to have another vote, and