Lafayette, shall we vote France off the island?

Columnist Thomas Friedman is not only wise and smart, he is relevant.

Lafayette, we were there, but now the door is bolted.

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Vote France Off the Island
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN - New York Times 2/9/03

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.