The French Way (39 page)

A potential rift occurred in late 1997 and early 1998 after Saddam blocked UN weapons inspectors. France angered American officials by abstaining rather than voting for a tough UN Security Council resolution. Clinton then threatened massive air strikes, but Chirac warned him such action would turn the entire Arab world against the West and destabilize the region. In this case the two presidents found a way to work together in a kind of “good cop/bad cop” scenario, with Chirac negotiating and Clinton menacing. It worked, and Saddam gave
way and allowed the inspectors back before American aircraft and missiles were scheduled to strike in February. The French public strongly backed their government's approach to Iraq. Chirac acknowledged that the threat of force played its part in curbing Saddam, but he also declared that the crisis “proves one can obtain the respect of the law, which was our goal, by diplomacy and not only by force.”
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But then came Operation Desert Fox.

When Saddam once again interfered with UN weapons inspections he triggered an Anglo-American attack in December 1998 by aircraft and missiles targeted mainly at his capacity for developing and delivering weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration did not consult the Security Council because it believed it had a mandate for enforcement under existing UN resolutions, which Saddam had blatantly defied, and it knew in advance that the Security Council—given Russian, Chinese, and possibly French opposition—would not endorse military action.
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France disapproved of Operation Desert Fox, as the U.S. plan was called, and withdrew from participating in the southern no-fly zone, ending any French role in the military containment of Iraq. Officials in Paris assumed (correctly) that Clinton sought regime change, which the UN had never sanctioned.
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But Chirac and his prime minister Lionel Jospin refused explicitly to condemn the bombing. They hedged—expressing reservations about Desert Fox—that it would probably fail to bring the dictator to heel and certainly add to the suffering of the Iraqi people, yet they blamed Saddam for provoking the attack. The government's equivocation derived from, on the one hand, its insistence on buttressing the Security Council's authority over Iraq and its own reluctance to use force, and, on the other hand, its fears that an open break with the United States would be ineffective and would be interpreted as concealing base motives like serving French economic interests.
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While the Jospin government demurred, its parliamentary majority, situated on the left, demanded an immediate end to the bombing and reproached the Anglo-Americans for bypassing
the Security Council, and opposition parties on the right echoed the disapproval out of fear of setting a bad precedent. And public opinion became more suspicious of U.S. ambitions because, coupled with Desert Fox, NATO began massive bombing in Kosovo three months later. Operation Desert Fox demonstrated once again that trying to act as America's partner, yet appear nonaligned, won few friends either at home or in Washington.

Far more controversial than Desert Fox, from the French public's perspective, was stopping the further disintegration of Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1998 into ethnic conflict, this time between the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo. It was in the interest of the United States and its European allies to extend stability to the Balkans and to prevent a humanitarian disaster. But to most Europeans, including the French, the alliance had no mandate to intervene since Kosovo was not a matter of self-defense. Military action could only be legitimated by the United Nations. Given a certain Russian veto, such authorization was unattainable, so the Clinton administration never pursued a formal resolution. The Chirac-Jospin tandem, and other European governments, found a way round the problem by arguing that the stalemate in the Security Council and the urgency of the humanitarian crisis justified making an exception. In the end the Security Council never explicitly authorized the use of force though the secretary-general implicitly endorsed it.
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The use of force again divided the allies. They tentatively agreed on threatening air strikes in the event that Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb president, refused to concede autonomy to the Kosovars and halt the carnage inflicted by his police and military units. But they disagreed on actually bombing because the U.S. government refused to commit ground forces to a follow-up NATO peacekeeping operation. The Clinton administration was wary of sending American troops under any circumstances. Only after negotiations between the Albanians and Serbs at the Rambouillet Conference failed in early 1999 did the White House reluctantly agree to the possibility of inserting a small number
of ground troops to implement a future political settlement. The Americans mistakenly assumed the threat, or at most the demonstration, of air strikes would bring the Serbs back to the table. The British and the French, in contrast, from early on leaned toward using ground forces to enforce a political settlement and in January 1999 Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac jointly endorsed military action, including the dispatch of ground forces.
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The Serbs refused to be intimidated by such threats and intensified their harassment and brutalization of the Albanian Kosovars, trying to force as many of the native populace as they could out of Kosovo. The Atlantic Alliance, led by a cautious White House, finally launched an air campaign in March.

Attacks by cruise missiles and allied aircraft, mostly American but some French and British, dragged on through the spring while the Serbs continued expelling Albanians from their homes. Domestic support among some of the Europeans began to waver when the bombing campaign failed to stop Milosevic. There was disagreement among the allies about stronger tactics: Tony Blair aggressively pushed for a ground invasion, Chirac objected, the Germans and the Italians favored other options, and the Clinton administration slowly came around to the British position.
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A land attack, however, proved unnecessary. By the end of May Milosevic wanted to stop the bombing and NATO, with the diplomatic assistance of the Russians and the EU, won his agreement to withdraw his forces from Kosovo with the UN, providing diplomatic cover for a NATO takeover of peacekeeping. More than 30,000 troops, including 7,000 from France, formed the Kosovo Force for peacekeeping. In the end the alliance hung together and did not falter.
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The war in Kosovo did not damage relations between France and the United States to the extent that the events in Bosnia did; it may have even marked a high point in cooperation. But there were strains. The Americans felt confined by NATO's cumbersome apparatus; selecting bombing targets required the agreement of more than a dozen allies. The French wrestled with the U.S. military over limiting targets
in Belgrade, seeking both to preserve their long-standing relations with the Serb people and to constrain the superpower's ability to act alone in Europe. But the French found themselves subordinate to an erratic and dominating ally. They observed, for example, how many American aircraft operated independently outside the NATO battle plan. This second Balkan crisis thus underscored, according to Chirac, the need for an autonomous European defense capacity.
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In retrospect the initial reluctance of the United States to help stabilize Kosovo and its overbearing conduct of the bombing prompted Europeans to intensify their efforts at constructing the ESDP.

Figure 11. Presidents Jacques Chirac and Bill Clinton at the Elysee celebrating French-U.S. cooperation in Kosovo, June 1999. Courtesy French Embassy Press and Information Division, Washington, D.C.

Despite relative alliance harmony, Kosovo ignited the loudest protest among French elites compared to any similar event in the 1990s. Politicians and intellectuals questioned the legitimacy, purpose, and consequences of NATO's intervention and they writhed
under what appeared to be European submission to the almighty superpower.
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Among the political class the extremes, as usual, joined hands: on the far left were the communists and the Citizen's Movement of Jean-Pierre Chevenement, and on the far right were Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, and senior Gaullists like Philippe Seguin, Alain Peyrefitte, and Charles Pasqua. According to these critics Chirac and Jospin had pandered to the Yankee overlords, who dragged Europeans into “NATO's war.” NATO aggression had trumped the United Nations, international law, and national sovereignty. Peyrefitte called the war “illegal and immoral”; Le Pen complained that Kosovo proved Europe was “under America's heel”; and Chevenement's friends warned intervention would exacerbate ethnic and nationalist tensions in the region. The front page of the Communist Party newspaper,
L'Humanite
, resurrected a Cold War slogan: “NATO Go Home.” Among the intellectuals who feasted on Kosovo were familiar names like Regis Debray, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Max Gallo, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; they regretted Europe's powerlessness and asked for an alternative to either bombing or ethnic cleansing. The editor of the magazine
Marianne
, Jean-Francois Kahn, amazingly saw a kind of moral equivalence between Euro-American air strikes and Serbian forced deportations. Kahn went on to make the ludicrous prediction that one day Alsace would ask for its independence and 30,000 NATO troops would arrive to assure it. Regis Debray visited the region: he found no evidence to validate the charge of Serbian genocide and saw numerous mosques intact and Albanian pizzerias open for business while noting the damage done to Serb schools and factories. As a media expert Debray thought the French had been so “mesmerized” by CNN's coverage of the war that they accepted the State Department's account of “moral idealism and technical superiority—let's say Wilsonianism plus the tomahawk [missile].”
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And Baudrillard opined that the United States projected its power in the Balkans as a way of preventing a united Europe from becoming a rival.
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The taunts of these left-wing intellectuals did not go unanswered. The anti-anti-Americans faced them down. Bernard-Henri Levy assailed Debray while Andre Glucksmann proclaimed, “We have to be ready to die for Pristina [the capital of Kosovo] because to die for Pristina is to die for the future of Europe. Americans have died for Europe twice. Now we have to make sacrifices to show this continent will no longer tolerate policies that recall Stalin.”
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And scholars at a colloquium on anti-Americanism held at the Sorbonne in June joined . Sociologist Michel Wieviorka labeled such posturing as “one of the most outdated expressions of the classic figure of the French intellectual.”
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Pascal Bruckner lost his temper with the “idiocies” of Kahn, Debray, and the other anti-Americans, pointing out that it was the Europeans, not the Americans, who sought NATO's intervention. Bruckner added he much preferred the values of freedom, law, and pluralism associated with the West than those like ethnic purity that were championed by the Serbs.
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The French government and its defenders refuted accusations of being America's lapdog. France was a leader, not a follower.
Le Monde
claimed that the French, along with the British and the Germans, initiated the diplomatic offensive against Milosevic, won the blessing of the secretary-general of the United Nations, and persuaded Clinton to both risk military intervention and engage the Russians in the diplomacy that ended the conflict.
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Moreover, France, it was pointed out, was a major military partner whose air sorties were second in number only to those flown by the Americans. Chirac and the defense minister stressed their country's participation in the alliance's decision making, with the president asserting that France approved the targets for all 22,000 air sorties and the survival of most of the bridges in Belgrade was the doing of France.
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Paris, at least officially, overlooked alliance tensions and argued that Kosovo proved that NATO as a transatlantic partnership could be effective.

The public largely accepted the rationale for bombing.
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Polls suggested that between one-half and two-thirds of the French people
backed the campaign. Nevertheless, the Kosovo crisis exposed deepening mistrust of the United States. In a survey conducted as NATO bombs fell in Yugoslavia, two of three said they were worried about “the unique superpower status of the U.S.”
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And two-thirds also thought Washington's motives for intervening in the Balkans were to serve its political and military interests rather than to defend human rights and democracy. These motives were attributed to the Clinton administration despite the fact that both President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin had endorsed the bombing. The same survey also showed that almost as many of the French preferred a common European defense without the United States as those who backed the alliance.

The Hyperpower