'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

BLAMING THE FRENCH: This seems

BLAMING THE FRENCH: This seems to be one of the slightly underhanded tactics that's emerged from the Trio Con Brio summit over the weekend. It was certainly a fairly strong theme in Bush speech tonight. And there's buzz from London that Blair might try to exploit the anti-French prejudice that's still strong in the UK to shore up his very shaky position.

The main gist of the argument is that it's the fault of the French that the Anglo-Saxon warriors didn't get their eminently sensible, eminently flexible etc resolution through the Security Council. That if those darn' Frenchies hadn't had "the Gaul" (sorry about that) to announce their veto upfront, all those members of the putatively saleable six would have come singing along to Foggy Bottom for their respective payoffs, and the Anglo-Saxons would at least have gotten the "moral victory" of a strong-majority vote of nine members for the Blair/Bush resolution in the SC, even if the vote did not in the end prove veto-proof.

I think this argument is as weak and dishonest as many of the other arguments the warhawks have come up with over recent months. First, it relies on an unproven assumption that Angola, Cameroon, Chile, etc, could all have been bought. Baloney. As I wrote before here, the French looked set to do pretty well with the three African SC members. And by all accounts, the Chileans were pretty well pissed by the news accounts of NSA SIGINT operations at the UN that raised all their engrained fears that US intelligence agencies were once again interfering in their country's democratic processes...

Secondly, this argument makes it seem like it was grossly unfair of the French to have showed their hands even before the vote was taken. Well, grow up. There were two dozen or more SC draft resolutions from the Reagan era on that sought to curb some of Israel's excesses in the Occupied Territories, that the U.S. vetoed-- and in many of those cases it had announced its intention to veto very early during the negotiations. For some of those resolutions, the US 'no' vote stood quite alone, against 14 'yes' votes.

So if, on something they feel very strongly about, the French-- whose veto in the UN is every bit as "legitimate" as Washington's-- should choose to use the veto, and to announce their intention to do so fairly early on-- well, that's how the game gets played in the security Council... Or it did, until recently.

Plus, of course, did I mention that the US has wielded its veto far, far more frequently over the years than have the French.

I've increasingly had the feeling that the whole UN process has been at best a diversion for the Bushies, while at worst they have been quite prepared to hold it hostage and threaten its viability as they've girded up for their fight-to-the-death against Saddam. Many of the Bushies and their supporters have expressed open contempt for the organization and have seemed openly gleeful that it has "proved" (to them, at least) its dysfunctionality this time, yet again.

It was Maureen Dowd who in her great March 5 column in the NYT, "What Would Genghis Do?", revealed that in August 2001, the suits in the Pentagon commissioned a study of the strengths and weakness of previous stand-alone world empires... Well, if a new Anglo-Saxon "Rome" should emerge from the ashes of the ever-closer war, I know that I for one will want to line up with that feisty Gallic resistant, Asterix.