France will be a loser in the second Gulf War

President Chirac would prefer to have avoided being thrust into such an heroically exposed position

Jacques Chirac is on a high. In his 71st year, and his 35th year as a front-line politician, the man so often dismissed (with reason) as a lightweight and a cynic has assured his place in French history. Like Charles de Gaulle, Monsieur Chirac will always be the man who dared to say "non". He finds himself as the de facto head of a "peace" coalition, which stretches from Moscow to the Vatican and from The New York Times to ex-president Jimmy Carter by way of 70-80 per cent of European (including British) public opinion.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, last week condemned France's threat to use its UN veto as an "extremist" position. The whole point of calling the Azores summit seems to have been to try to paint the French as unreasonable extremists, holding up the reasonable rush to war.

Extremists? The French position is that arms inspections should continue, while they are manifestly making progress. If that is extremist, the editorial board of The New York Times is extremist. So is Pope John Paul II. So is Kofi Annan.

And yet, arguably, Jacques Chirac has blown it. This is not where he intended to be when France signed UN resolution 1441 last November. He hoped to avoid confrontation with Washington and steer President Bush towards a longer game of containment of Saddam. M. Chirac did not rule out military action but only as a last resort if Baghdad refused to co-operate.

Both Downing Street and the White House have wilfully misrepresented what M. Chirac said in his veto announcement last week. They say that he declared that France could never agree to military action "in any circumstances". In truth he said that France was opposed to war "in any circumstances" while inspections were making progress. If Saddam stopped co-operating, he said, France would be ready to support military intervention.

The crucial point for France was that no UN resolution should give, in advance, a country, or group of countries, the right to declare war in the UN's name. It should be up to the inspectors to say that Saddam has failed to co-operate. It should then – and only then – be up to the Security Council to vote for or against war. With the British-Spanish-US resolution withdrawn, France will not actually have to use its veto. But it suits Britain and the US to pretend – with doubtful logic – that they would have gathered the nine votes that they needed if the unreasonable, extremist M. Chirac had not made his veto threat.

The invasion of Iraq will go ahead. The Security Council, seat of France's authority in world affairs, will be marginalised by Washington. Franco-American relations have been ruined for a generation. The EU is fractured into two camps, and not necessarily to France's numerical, or political, advantage. France will clearly be among the losers in the second Gulf War. Whatever moral and historical stature M. Chirac can claim as leader of the peace party, he would prefer to have avoided being thrust into such an heroically exposed position.

The British and American media make much of the fact that France has economic ties with Iraq; but whatever the rightness or wrongness of such ties, they do not explain France's opposition to an Iraqi war. Economically, France has far more to lose from balking the US.

So why such Gallic stubbornness? President Chirac has a particular view of France (as a country with a distinctive, moral voice, which should not always oppose the US or always agree with it). He also has a traditionalist view of the UN, as a body that was created to prevent wars, not start preventative wars. He believes that the EU should sometimes use its weight to support the US, sometimes to counter-balance the US. He sees a US administration which believes that America has Might and America is Right and that America's Might should be used to serve America's definition of the Right. He was especially incensed by Washington, and Downing Street's, insistence that the Security Council can only prove its "relevance" by doing America's bidding.

M. Chirac does not see what sensible precedent an Iraqi war would create. Would the US and British genuinely consider invading North Korea or Iran? The first Gulf War, although justified, spawned Osama bin Laden. How many Bin Ladens would a second spawn? M. Chirac's understanding of the international interest, his sense of the national interest, no doubt his personal vanity in some measure, all pointed in the same direction, In that sense, the veto may not have been a hard choice.

But it was a hard choice. It was an admission of French diplomatic failure, and a decision from which – in the short term anyway – France will lose more than it gains. By shutting down diplomacy yesterday, the US and Britain turned off France's microphone. Rightly or wrongly – in my view, wrongly – it will not be easy for France to turn it back on again.

indyparis@compuserve.com