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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/opinion/09FRIE.html

Vote France Off the Island
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of
the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the
starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team — with a
vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France
off the Council and replace it with India. Then the
perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and
the United States. That's more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the
world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu
nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation,
and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious
than France these days. France is so caught up with
its need to differentiate itself from America to feel
important, it's become silly. India has grown out of
that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq,
but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France
can't see how the world has changed since the end of
the cold war. India can.

Throughout the cold war, France sought to
differentiate itself by playing between the Soviet and
American blocs. France could get away with this
entertaining little game for two reasons: first, it
knew that Uncle Sam, in the end, would always protect
it from the Soviet bear. So France could tweak
America's beak, do business with Iraq and enjoy
America's military protection. And second, the cold
war world was, we now realize, a much more stable
place. Although it was divided between two nuclear
superpowers, both were status quo powers in their own
way. They represented different orders, but they both
represented order.

That is now gone. Today's world is also divided, but
it is increasingly divided between the "World of
Order" — anchored by America, the E.U., Russia, India,
China and Japan, and joined by scores of smaller
nations — and the "World of Disorder." The World of
Disorder is dominated by rogue regimes like Iraq's and
North Korea's and the various global terrorist
networks that feed off the troubled string of states
stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia.

How the World of Order deals with the World of
Disorder is the key question of the day. There is room
for disagreement. There is no room for a lack of
seriousness. And the whole French game on Iraq,
spearheaded by its diplomacy-lite foreign minister,
Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of
France's energy is devoted to holding America back
from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein's feet
to the fire to comply with the U.N.

The French position is utterly incoherent. The
inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin,
because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and,
therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors.
But the inspections have failed not because of a
shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a
shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French
know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug
like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by
tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will
be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam's
government pass "legislation to prohibit the
manufacture of weapons of mass destruction." (I am not
making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of
why, if America didn't exist and Europe had to rely on
France, most Europeans today would be speaking either
German or Russian.

I also want to avoid a war — but not by letting Saddam
off the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back
the winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen
the World of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce
Saddam into compliance — without a war — is for the
whole world to line up shoulder-to-shoulder against
his misbehavior, without any gaps. But France, as they
say in kindergarten, does not play well with others.
If you line up against Saddam you're just one of the
gang. If you hold out against America, you're unique.
"France, it seems, would rather be more important in a
world of chaos than less important in a world of
order," says the foreign policy expert Michael
Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the
World."

If France were serious about its own position, it
would join the U.S. in setting a deadline for Iraq to
comply, and backing it up with a second U.N.
resolution authorizing force if Iraq does not. And
France would send its prime minister to Iraq to tell
that directly to Saddam. Oh, France's prime minister
was on the road last week. He was out drumming up
business for French companies in the world's biggest
emerging computer society. He was in India.  



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