America Divided, France no longer concerned?
A lot of angry voices are rising in chorus this summer. The night before the 2007 Independence Day, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann accuses the President of “lying this country into war”. On July 8th, The New York Times calls for an “orderly exit” from Iraq. The night of July 18th sees the Senate pull an all-night debate about an Iraq exit strategy to manoeuvre around a Republican filibuster and fail.
Typical political rifts have been cauterized along the debate lines of phased withdrawal. Partisan fidelity is no longer the great polarizer domestically, as it was in the 2004 elections, with even Republicans beginning to defect. The question remains: how does the rest of the world view this internal partisan division? Since its inception, the Iraq war has provoked strong reactions world wide. Anti-war sentiment has been conflated with anti-Americanism, and nowhere is this truer than in France. But how do the French feel now that Americans no longer present a uniform front about their strategies or position in the world?
If we time-trip back to 2002, a majority of the French were relentless in their anti-war campaigns. However, the enormity of the en masse demonstrations has been misconstrued. French elites typically legislate behind closed doors. Voters are accustomed to reacting publicly and loudly in the streets. In this instance, the importance of the issue forced the French to protest before French politicians acted. But the protests themselves were not atypical of French behaviour. Neither were the demonstrations isolated to France. The perception of an emerging ‘neo-con bellicosity’ was global. Yet, the American backlash to the apparent insult cemented the idea of a widening trans-Atlantic gulf.
Five years later, the landscape of popular opinion has changed in France. Typical mid-day brasserie chatter still has many Parisians alluding to inflated ‘patriotism’ of Americans. Recent presidential elections, though, have just replaced noted Gaullist Jacques Chirac with Nicolas “the American” Sarkozy. Furthermore, according to the US ambassador to France, Craig Roberts Stapleton, America has seen some symbolic re-engagement with the 5th Republic. Condoleeza Rice recently visited Paris officially for the first time. Furthermore, the USS Enterprise was only just docked in Nice. The taking to port of America’s best vessel was meant to evidence a growing collaboration of American Forces and French defence in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Lebanon (even though no American forces are deployed there). In the words of Ambassador Stapleton as quoted in Le Temps, “the disaccord that we have known in relation to Iraq does not negate this cooperation”.
One must also take into account the domestic changes that have occurred in the US since 2002. In 2006 the Democrats took over Congress with a promise to begin phased out withdrawal of troops. However, any political stratagems on the Democrats' part have been successfully blocked by in-house opposition or the threat of the presidential veto. Clearly, the spirit of bi-partisanship has crumbled since 9/11. At the advent of the Iraq war, even notable Democrats like Senator Hilary Clinton voted to support the invasion. This is no longer true today. Yet, for all of this division, not much has changed in terms of strategy. Eighteen benchmarks for the Iraqi government were set by the Bush administration at the request of Congressional Democrats in late 2006. Only nine have been met. The 2006 Baker-Hamilton report that recommended several controversial solutions to the conflict in Iraq has been largely dismissed and forgotten. And all debates about phased withdrawals have been delayed until September.
This inaction has led to the disenchantment of a large portion of the American population with its political leadership. Democrats themselves have become internally divided. Presidential candidates are quick to point out past mistakes of their fellow opponents. And as one outspoken candidate, Dennis Kucinich, put it, the Democrats have failed their constituents.
Meanwhile, the French have maintained a half-hearted interest in on-going events. Most dailies relegate the newest details about what they term the American ‘bourbier’, or morass, to their international sections rather than their front pages. Like other European countries with forces deployed around the world, concerns over their own troops and their problems with maintaining foreign deployments prevail. Many condemn what they see as ‘building democracy with bombs’ and remain negative about the Bush presidency. However, that particular sentiment is not isolated to France.
Die-hard leftists in France, on the other hand, have maintained their exceptionally virulent criticisms of the war. One must keep in mind that the extreme left in France is a remnant of the second largest non-Soviet Communist party. Whereas, American liberals converge closer towards the center, the French left goes farther a field. The extreme French leftists thus took the Democrats’ concessions to President Bush as evidence of a deep betrayal. As one article, appearing in both Italy’s Il Manifesto and France’s Le Grand Soir Info, stated, Democrats are merely pretending to anticipate the wishes of the American public while delaying action until they can take “revenge” on the Republicans in the following election year. The extreme left, however, is presently very marginal and hardly representative of popular opinion . In the most recent election, the Parti Communiste Français garnered under 2% of the vote, less than the radical right of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Presently, it would seem the debacles of the Iraq war are not foremost in the minds of the French public; however, future events could quickly rev up French interest. President Bush has promised to ‘internationalize’ Iraq’s conflict resolution by re-engaging with the UN. As the French daily Le Temps reports, Bush could be looking for a surprising ally in the Security Council: France. Under Sarkozy, the French could see themselves championing civilian activities in Iraq. The success of this type of mission could yet again moderate their attitudes toward American leadership and their plans in the Middle East.