[Drugmachine]

I sure hope so. The Wall St. Journal had a long, detailed opinion piece on the subject recently, too, which said basically that we should give France the Cheney treatment.

I think the US, and all other free nations, need to withdraw from any policy-making body that includes France. France's international power is almost entirely due to the institutions funded by the USA. It is an appropriate cost that they should lose that power as the consequence of abusing it.

I think if we merely admit to one another that we each follow radical different national foreign policy agendas it would help. After all nothing works like success. The US has emerged as the sole superpower and we believe that we can spread that success to the rest of the world. Europe - to be fair is enjoying the longest period of time SINCE THE ROMAN EMPIRE of not butchering each other. So this is what they believe they are supposed to spread around the world.

[Slonopotam845]

NATO plans Iraq mission despite Chiraq
By Guy Dinmore in Washington and James Drummond and Nicolas Pelham in Baghdad
Published: July 2 2004 20:48 | Last Updated: July 2 2004 20:48

Top Nato commanders are to lead the alliance's first mission to Iraq next week to prepare for the training of security forces inside the country, in spite of the objections of Jacques Chirac, the French president, to using the Nato banner inside Iraq.


A senior US official said on Friday that two American officers, General James Jones, the alliance's supreme commander, and Admiral Gregory Johnson, commander of joint force command Naples, would lead the delegation.

"We are not going to fly battalions of Iraqi soldiers out of the country. We are not going to be distracted by French rhetoric," the official commented.

But the US official, who asked not to be named, rejected media reports suggesting the pre-war transatlantic rift between the US and France threatened the commitment made at this week's Istanbul Nato summit to help Iraq's new government.

The official described Mr Chirac as having been a "little emotional" at his press conference in Istanbul when he had objected to Nato training forces within Iraq, suggesting differences between Paris and Washington were over means, not ends. He said the US welcomed the French offer to train Iraqi police in France.

The US and France, he said, were still working on ways to send additional Nato forces to Afghanistan ahead of elections planned for September. He said President Hamid Karzai wanted to keep to that timetable and the US would support him. France has objected to using Nato's rapid response force for the job.

Analysts in Washington suspect Mr Chirac, and possibly Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, will refrain from offering substantial aid for Iraq before the US presidential election in November.

"Basically, at [Nato's summit in Turkey] we saw an attempt to mask disagreement through agreed statements. In reality, the divisions within Nato remain," commented Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution. "Those who opposed Bush before the war have no incentive to support him now. This is partly because they believe the course embarked upon is bound to fail."

The transfer of sovereignty to Iraq's interim government this week has prompted some Arab countries to consider participating in peacekeeping.

Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, was reported to have written to the leaders of Bahrain, Oman and Morocco asking them to join other countries in the UN-sanctioned force.

Oman and Morocco, however, have for the moment refused. But Yemen and Jordan have signalled that they could respond positively to an Iraqi request. Reuters reports: The US army has charged four soldiers, three of them with manslaughter, over the drowning of an Iraqi prisoner, officials said on Friday.

Newspaper reports in Colorado, where the soldiers were based, said they were accused of forcing two Iraqis to jump off a bridge in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, on January 3.

[9mm_fan]

Ironic that it comes on the same day Chirac demanded that Bush not interfere in France-Turkey relations.

Maybe it's not ironic. Maybe it tallies.

[tgs]

Yet according to Judith Klinghoffer's reading of the BBC, France is increasingly isolating itself.

http://hnn.us/blogs/3.html

LE MONDE - FRANCE ISOLATED ON IRAQ


As I have previously noted, US is winning ugly strategically - This item is from the BBC press review which labels it "France's dilemma:"

Under the headline "Splendid isolation", France's Le Monde says the Iraq issue is confronting President Jacques Chirac with "a highly difficult diplomatic equation".

The president, it says, has to work out a way of "maintaining his opposition to the war without appearing to be shamefully nostalgic for Saddam Hussein".

His dilemma is "how not to oppose the reconstruction of a 'sovereign' Iraq without reneging on his original position".

As a result, at the Nato summit in Istanbul "France found itself isolated in its refusal to accede to America's requests and in its blunt criticism of George W. Bush's public pronouncements."

[Slonopotam845]

Maybe it's just the same battle fought on new ground. Maybe the official doctrine of France is to deny NATO or EU assistance in any and all venues associated with the US. Maybe this signals the beginning of a formal diplomatic disengagement between France and the US. I hope so.

[S.T.D.]

The NRF is a backstop plan to fill in for a decades long EU plan of creating the "RRF" or rapid response force". The NATO alternative was used because after nearly 20 years of trying to create the RRF it is still vapor. There are a few problems with this:

Funding - the EU would have to outspend the US as a portion of GDP for the next ten years to build a credible force.

Mission - on this they are right, there is no clear doctrine for what they would do. What would it 'respond' to?

Command - there is no real defined command structure outside of NATO and no organized approach at all in light of a mission gap.

Politicalization - mission selection is bound as we see now to become highly politicized and would lead the NRF/RRF either to paralysis or to serve purely political-economic-nationalized ends.