FRANCE: The US and Britain have adopted a carrot and stick strategy in the hope of persuading Paris - the "ring leader" of opposition to a Gulf war - to accept or at least refrain from vetoing the draft resolution presented to the UN Security Council on Monday.
Paris glimpsed the stick yesterday, when the US ambassador, Mr Howard Leach, told LCI television, "I hope there won't be a veto, because a veto would be very unfriendly and we would not look favourably on that."
This contrasted with the softer approach taken by the US National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of "an all-out diplomatic effort" to persuade France, Russia and China to vote for the resolution. The British Foreign Minister, Mr Jack Straw, predicted the period before the draft resolution is brought to a vote would "concentrate the minds" of recalcitrant Security Council members.
Yet it is almost impossible that France would support the US-British-Spanish text, which asserts that Iraq is in material breach and has failed to seize the last opportunity to disarm. The rival memorandum submitted at the same time by France, Russia and Germany notes that no proof has been provided that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, and foresees at least four more months of inspections.
French officials say the "theatre" in the Security Council is entering its final act, and expect a hard confrontation between the US and France, in which each holds a diplomatic weapon of last resort they would prefer not to use.
For Washington, it is the threat to go to war without a UN mandate; for Paris, the threat of vetoing the resolution submitted on Monday.
French officials dismiss predictions that either would destroy the UN system. "One can perhaps envisage a war without the United Nations, but one can certainly not imagine the peace without the United Nations," President Jacques Chirac said on February 21st.
France has not used its veto, sometimes described as the "atomic weapon" of diplomacy, in more than a decade. But Washington uses its veto fairly often, usually to prevent resolutions it considers unfavourable to Israel, such as those calling for the deployment of peacekeepers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Only once, in New York on January 20th, did the French Foreign Minister specifically threaten to use the veto. But Mr Chirac is determined to keep the option open, even if the economic and political costs insinuated by Ambassador Leach would be high.
France would much prefer that the US-British-Spanish resolution stumble for lack of the required nine votes. To this end, Paris, like Washington, is fiercely lobbying the six "floating" countries on the Security Council: Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Pakistan, Chile and Mexico.
Washington would have to convince five of the six to vote with it; Paris need only convince two to abstain and the resolution would die.
In the absence of agreement, Paris is going ahead as if its memorandum were in force. On Monday, French Mirage IV jets left for Saudi Arabia, to assist weapons inspectors in aerial surveillance. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) also appear to be acting under the terms of the memorandum, which calls for their work to be accelerated, and for remaining tasks to be defined in function of priority.
Yesterday the IAEA announced it would bring forward a planned report by Dr Mohamed ElBaradei in a month so it coincides with Dr Hans Blix's presentation to the Security Council on March 7th.
