Stardate 20030321.1556

(Captain's log): So there you are, leader of a nation. Things aren't going well internally; there's strife and the streets aren't safe. The economy is stagnant and fragile and unemployment is high and rising. The people are grumbling and your future is on the line. And you don't know what to do about the problem, because all the solutions are politically impossible even for you.

Your primary goal is to stay in power, and so you need to find something which will still the protests. Answer, right out of the history books: Wrap yourself in the flag, and go pick a fight with someone externally. If domestic affairs are a disaster, distract everyone with foreign policy. People naturally tend to rally during times of external crisis, and will defer their complaints about the domestic crisis.

That's what the generals in Argentina did in this situation. In their case they picked a real fight by invading the Falkland Islands, a couple of rocks in the middle of the south Atlantic occupied by a few hundred Brits, several thousand sheep, and some of the time by upwards of a million penguins.

Needless to say, that war went badly, and the generals were deposed anyway. And in fact, usually when some embattled leader tries this tactic it ends up only delaying the inevitable. Usually his goose is cooked anyway. He might lose externally, and even if he doesn't eventually the people will again start to focus on why the nation is in trouble domestically.

Still, leaders use this in part because it's really easy. Picking a fight is not at all hard, and it does at least for a while seem to solve the problem. But eventually the party ends, and you wake up with a hangover.

Chirac has one now. His party ended last Sunday in the Azores, and it doesn't seem as if he's figured it out. He wants to keep drinking, but they've closed the bar.

And the problems inside France have only gotten worse.

French unemployment has risen sharply over the last year to 9.1 per cent and is poised to breach the traumatic 10 per cent threshold this year. The rapid slowdown in French economic growth — the official forecast for GDP growth in 2003 was halved this week to a mere 1.3 per cent — means that France will soon be in violation of European Union rules on both budget deficits and public debt.

And violent crime is a major problem and it's growing. Crime against property and crime against people are both on the rise and are at levels well beyond anything we Americans would tolerate. The French police and the French legal system seem unable or unwilling to cope, and large parts of France's biggest cities are essentially lawless anarchy.

But! For a while, Le Grand Jacques was able to stand up to the Amis, and for a while Paris again was in the spotlight internationally. For a while the French mattered again; for a while it seemed as if France was a world power. And suddenly, it all ended. Like a bursting soapbubble, all of a sudden France no longer matters.

Events have passed France by. The seeming power was all illusionary; it was all based on France's possession of a veto in the UN Security Council, and within that realm France therefore truly did matter. But once the US and UK decided to cease playing around with the UN, France no longer had any way of influencing events.

And in the course of standing up to the big, bad Yanks, Chirac also caused a lot of other damage. The exhilaration of bearding Uncle Sam in his den will fade rapidly, but the animosity created in this incident will not. France had been disproportionately influential in the process of creation of the EU and in trying to guide its alleged unified foreign policy, but Chirac's heavy handedness during this interval has revealed both him and the French polity for what they really are, and now many other nations within the EU have become deeply suspicious of French motives and the policies France has been advocating. France's relations with the rest of Europe will suffer for years.

And so will their relations with the US, the world's 600 pound canary. They seem to think that this will all blow over, and that there will be no long term consequences. That's foolish. Unless something major turns up in Iraqi records, we're not likely to end up at war with France, but American relations with France will be distinctly cool from now on. We'll trade with them, though probably at a diminished level, and we'll even cooperate with them when there's a clear advantage in doing so, but there will be no trust and no affection; no camaraderie.

And Chirac is rapidly turning himself into a clown, with his continued attempts to pretend that France actually matters and that the UNSC still makes a difference (and thus that France's veto is important). Thus we have the ludicrous pronouncement that France will not let the UNSC pass a resolution which gives the US and UK the right to administer post-war Iraq. Conspicuous by its absence is any explanation of exactly what the French intend to do about it if we go ahead and administer Iraq anyway and don't even bother asking the UN.

You'd think that question would occur to them, given that we're also fighting a war after having bypassed the UN. And, in fact, the only conclusion we can reach about this is that Chirac is playing to the balcony. What he says won't make any d