April 26, 2003 French consul shrugs off criticism By MICHAEL TODD Talking in ways that wouldn't have sounded out of place during the Reagan administration, France's consul general in Los Angeles told a Santa Barbara audience Thursday night that the Transatlantic rift created by the war in Iraq is serious but can mended. Jean-Luc Sibiude's comments came the same week that administration hawks -- "h'oaks" as rendered in Mr. Sibiude's accent -- promised that France would be "punished" for its intransigence in the weeks before the war. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, several times held up by Mr. Sibiude as the paragon of what an American diplomat should be, admitted that France would suffer consequences for its actions, although neither Mr. Powell nor his spokesman, Richard Boucher, detailed what those consequences might be. The most likely actions, according to wire service reports quoting unnamed officials, would be snubbing France at some high-level diplomatic get-togethers, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or other Transatlantic talking shops. Before the war started, France and Germany -- both putative American allies and founding members of NATO -- led efforts to forestall any American military action, with France going so far as to promise a veto in the United Nations Security Council as American diplomats tried to arrange a definitive resolution allowing the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime. Germany, whose political and domestic opposition seemed even more brazen, has not been singled out for a whupping. Thursday, speaking before about 80 people in the Schott Center attending moderator Bayard Stockton's spring talk series on "America's Global Reach," Mr. Sibiude brushed off fears of any trip to Uncle Sam's woodshed. "We are still allies and friends despite any actual clouds in our relationship," he said at the beginning of his remarks. Later, he wondered what crime France had committed. "What punishment do you mean? Do you punish friendship? Do you punish principles? Do you punish freedom of choice?" Mr. Sibiude was less sanguine about the walloping France has taken in the American public, especially in more bedrock conservative locales like the Midwest. The agglomeration of slights, from renaming French fries to "freedom fries" or the boffo popularity among the chattering classes of The Simpsons-derived "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," is taking a toll, he acknowledged. "While it's not something we enjoy, if it was limited to the French fries I could live with that. What bothers me," he said, "is the accumulation of things." But Mr. Sibiude's talk was nonetheless littered with past fits of pique between the United States and its very first global friend. Noting that Americans were used to dealing with France as its "prickly ally," he denied that France had a hidden agenda in the Iraq imbroglio, that France was acting out its "past grandeur" or that France habitually would gainsay any American initiative. Gallic diplomacy, he averred, was a diplomacy "about convictions." Although he never used the term "naive" or "cowboy," he repeatedly sounded themes that have long dogged U.S. French relations -- America as a hard-punching Boy Scout, vs. France as the seasoned practitioner of realpolitik. Mr. Sibiude differentiated between necessary wars, such as the war on terror in Afghanistan, and wars of choice. "Iraq was not an immediate and direct threat against U.S. or Western European interests," he said, and therefore France preferred to keep it weapons holstered. "If war was necessary, France would have been there with America, its friend and ally." He also addressed the perception that France always keeps its weapons holstered, at least when dealing with countries that weren't former colonies. The term "euroweenies," after all, dates from the Cold War. "We are not the pacifists that are portrayed in the press and by the administration. There is no phobia about the use of force when it is necessary and legitimate." The new American doctrine of preventative war, he continued, has particularly frightened Europeans, who are worried about its unpredictability. In Iraq, he said, "aggressive pressure combined with diplomatic virtue" could have achieved the same result. Mr. Sibiude repeatedly implied that American foreign policy was ham-handed, and that the U.S. could take a few lessons from old school diplomats from Old Europe, say, perhaps, France. |
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