Jacques Chirac has calmly braved the wrath of George W. Bush by holding firm on Iraq this week, reports Lara Marlowe in Paris.
It takes a cool head and strong nerves to defy the world's only superpower. For weeks, the warmongers have heaped abuse on the President of France. After Jacques Chirac announced on March 10th that he would veto a draft UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq, the State Department even accused him of "endangering the lives of US servicemen".
Within the high walls of the Élysée Palace, Chirac must feel waves of animosity pulsing across the Atlantic and the English Channel. But he seems to relish the jousting match that pits George W. Bush and Colin Powell against himself and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, often described as a surrogate son to Chirac.
In a career stretching back 40 years, Chirac has never enjoyed such adoration. The Catholic daily La Croix compares him to Nelson Mandela, and he has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
"Chirac is right," said placards carried by some of the 10 million anti-war demonstrators around the world on February 15th. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians cheered Chirac during a state visit to Algeria this month; witnesses described an almost metaphysical fusion between the French leader and "the Arab street". A gaggle of Hollywood stars - Jennifer Aniston, Nicolas Cage, Halle Berry, Richard Gere, Martin Sheen, Daniel Day-Lewis - express admiration for him.
Since his 70th birthday last November, Chirac has seemed to glory in the role of doyen of world leaders. When he went on French television on March 10th to explain his decision to oppose the UN resolution, he seemed calm and at ease, if a trifle pedantic. There was none of the stirring rhetoric of de Villepin's speeches in the Security Council; just a fatherly figure, eager to reassure his anxious compatriots that they would not be permanently estranged from America.
Things would fall into place again, when it was over. "After a war you must repair things," Chirac said. "They'll ask our help . . . and this reconstruction can only be done by the United Nations."
As for the European Union, split by the defection of Britain, Spain and east European candidates to the American camp, "I never thought Europe was a bed of roses," he continued, "but a steep path, littered with pitfalls". Once the "crisis with a small c" ended, Europe "will find, in her remorse at not having reached a common position, a new strength".
Jacques Chirac's optimism may stem from his own political good fortune. He knows that many of the 82 per cent of voters who re-elected him in May 2002 did so holding their noses, to prevent the racist, extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen from obtaining a high score. A year ago, he was described by his rival, the then prime minister Lionel Jospin, as "worn-out, old, tired". A magistrate tried to summon him in connection with an investigation into party financing, and Chirac was reported to have overcharged some €2.3 million on his food budget as Mayor of Paris. That was the last of a half-dozen corruption cases recently closed.
France's horror at having sent Le Pen to the run-off allowed Chirac to cast himself as "the defender of France's universal values". Then Bush began making bellicose noises, and Chirac took another principled stand, this time on a broader stage. He became the champion of the United Nations, a multi-polar world, international legitimacy, and peace. Cynics suggest he responded to polls showing how popular the policy was domestically. But after winning two-thirds of the National Assembly and almost monarchical powers in last year's election, he didn't need to pander to public opinion.
Chirac's greatest strength in the Iraq crisis is that, like Bush and Blair, he believes what he is saying. It's a tribute to the power of his arguments that two important texts this week - a New York Times editorial opposing war and an article by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, published by this newspaper and others - bore the mark of Chirac's thinking.
The New York Times argued for stepped-up UN weapons inspections, saying they could prevent Saddam Hussein starting new weapons programmes. Like Chirac, America's most influential newspaper argued that Washington could attain many of its objectives through inspections. Like Chirac, it cast doubt on alleged connections between the attacks of September 11th and Baghdad, and said the UN was too important to be sacrificed for the sake of war on Iraq. Annan's contention that war must always be a measure of last resort, and that only a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can bring lasting stability to the Middle East, are staples of Chirac discourse.
Throughout the crisis, Chirac has protested that he is not anti-American, even claiming to love junk food and recounting to TIME magazine his youthful adventures, hitch-hiking and doing odd jobs in the US. "Chirac doesn't admit to himself that he's anti-American," says Hervé Algalarrondo, a deputy editor of the Nouvel Observateur who covered Chirac's first term in office. "He likes the colourful side of America, the folklore. But he hates the US, because he thinks it epitomises Western arrogance." Chirac told Algalarrondo how King Juan Carlos of Spain invited him to a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. The president declined, saying the extermination of American Indians was a blot on the history of Europe and the US.
"He sees Europe as the 'mother of genocides'," Algalarrondo explains. "He thinks there's as much grandeur in civilisations outside Europe - among Eskimos, Indians and Africans - as in our own. He's allergic to the Bush administration's desire to impose 'the American way of life' on others." Significantly, the main cultural project of Chirac's presidency is a "Museum of First Arts" near the Eiffel Tower. While it is under construction, he persuaded the Louvre to open a department of "first arts" - having banned the term "primitive".
But the flip side of Chirac's tiers-mondisme are some unfortunate friendships. Last month, he was savaged by the British Sun for inviting the Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to the France-Africa summit in Paris. The Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma - who has hung onto office for 35 years - Omar Bongo of Gabon and Zeineddine Ben Ali of Tunisia are unsavoury "friends" of Chirac. He was the only Western leader to attend the funeral of the Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, though Assad was believed to have ordered the assassination of a French ambassador in Beirut in the 1980s.
Unfortunately for Chirac, his stand in the Iraq crisis has focused attention on his past friendship with Saddam Hussein. "I haven't seen him for a long time," Chirac told the New York Times. "He's probably changed since. So have I." In a recent cover story about 30 years of Franco-Iraqi relations, L'Express Magazine published a photograph of Chirac and Saddam raising their glasses in a toast when the then French prime minister visited Baghdad in 1974. The following year, Chirac held a gala dinner for Saddam at Versailles, and signed a contract to provide two nuclear reactors - one of which would have produced weapons-grade uranium - to Baghdad. Israel bombed them in 1981. In fairness, every French government of the 1970s and 1980s maintained close ties with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as did Washington.
For all his legendary charm, Chirac is cutting if challenged. When France's best-known television presenter, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, persisted in an unwelcome question about party financing, Chirac called him impertinent. In October, he called Blair "an ill-bred young man" because the British Prime Minister objected to a secret Franco-German agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy. Presidential aides cringed last month when he scolded east European countries for signing a pro-American statement, saying they had "missed a good opportunity to shut up". This week, Chirac looked set to depriveBush and Blair of a UN mandate for war on Iraq. Like his spiritual forebear, Gen Charles de Gaulle, he may go down in history as 'the man who said non '. "Bush and his European allies made an error of judgment from the beginning," de Villepin is reported to have said. "They thought France would not hold out until the end, that she'd let go. They underestimated us, and they underestimated Chirac."