[Colin Glassey 12:30 PM]
Steven Den Beste argues in this essay that France and, to a lesser extent, Russia have been trading with Saddam's government in Iraq for the last 10 years. Iraq has not paid what they owe, not fully. By now, the debt Iraq has run up is nearly 10 billion dollars owed to French companies. Den Beste argues in this other article that a new Iraqi government is likely to repudate these debts and as a result France and Russia both have a vested interest in seeing the current government of Saddam remain in place. In other words, France and Russia's principled rejection of the use of force against Iraq seems on closer analysis to be nothing more than trying to avoid having to write-off 10 or 20 billion dollars in debt to Saddam. This sounds right to me. Put the world (and especially United States cities) at risk to save some bad deals made with a ruthless dictator. Hey, its not their cities which are going to be nuked first by terrorists right?
In retrospect, it is clear that the United States should not have given France major power status at the end of the Second World War. France was broken by World War II, militarily defeated, its fleet sunk (by England when the Vichy government refused to sail it to English ports, in flat disregard for previous assurances made by the French government when France and England were allied). France was no more a great power in 1946 than Portugal was. Yet we gave them a permenant seat on the security council of the U.N. and gave them veto power. This was a mistake. They didn't have the muscle to justify it, and other countries have grown stronger faster than France over the last 57 years (obviously India).
France is a 2nd rate power that pretends to first rate power status and it is causing mischief diplomatically as a result. Yet another example of how the U.N. is broken. How can France (or any country) lose its veto power status? The U.N. just wasn't designed to handle changes over the moderate to long term.
12:29:50 PM 
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