It is more than 15 years since the French president, Jacques Chirac, and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, acted as ringleaders of international opposition to the Iraq War. And anyone who didn’t admire the resolute French position before the invasion was soon forced to change tack: as post-Saddam Iraq disintegrated into a morass of blood and violence, it was clear that Paris had shown prescience and judgment, as well as determination, in resisting George W. Bush’s rush to war.
How differently things now look. There are reports that the newly-elected French president Emmanuel Macron is now pushing for the use of military force against the Syrian government, urging President Trump to make a ‘firm response’ in retaliation for its alleged complicity in the use of chemical weapons in Douma on Saturday.
Macron, who in February declared that ‘France will strike’ the Syrian government if it crossed a ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons, has several motives for taking such a position. Perhaps he wants to please the Saudis, who are bitter opponents of the Syrian leader, Bashar al Assad but who offer French companies vast contracts. But above all he wants to reassert France’s historic role as a great global player, reversing its drastic post-war, and post-colonial loss of status. This is the same Macron who wants his country to take back control of the ‘core’ of the European Union, and who has vowed to challenge the dominance of the English language and instead make French more widely used.
The irony is, however, that by taking such his belligerent position over Syria the French president has forfeited a superb opportunity to win his country the very status and admiration that he desires.
This is because he is leading a drive to war before there is any independent proof of Assad’s complicity in the Douma incident. The outside world is asked to take on trust assertions from ‘local sources’ not just about the use of those weapons but who is responsible.
We have every reason to be cautious, most obviously because of the uncomfortable parallels with the disastrous interventions in both Iraq and Libya. The painful story of Iraqi WMD needs no repetition but we hear less about the atrocity story- the non-existent ‘massacre in Benghazi’- that stirred up pro-war sentiment against Colonel Gaddafi in February 2011. Barack Obama and David Cameron made much of this non-existent ‘bloodbath’ to justify their disastrous involvement in Libya but only later, too late to prevent our involvement in Libya, did it become apparent that it was as hollow as the talk about Saddam’s missiles.
There are other reasons to be cautious. It was not long ago that the American journalist, Seymour Hersh, reported that the Obama administration had struck a secret deal with the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to stage a sarin gas attack in Syria, by smuggling stocks of Libyan gas across the border, and blame it on Assad so that Washington would have an excuse to attack him.
Of course none of this is to say that Assad is not responsible. And perhaps, too, he does have a convincing reason to use chemical rather than conventional weapons. It is simply that everyone must keep an open mind about what happened at Douma and remember that so many wars have been started or stepped up because of false allegations. Some of the most obvious examples are the 1898 Spanish-American War, sparked by the sinking of an American vessel that was blamed, without a shred of evidence, on the Spanish, or the concoted Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which dragged America ever deeper into Vietnam. Given the timing of the Douma incident- coinciding with political pressure on Trump at home and the near-defeat of the Syrian rebels- we need to be sceptical.
It is just such a sceptical, adversarial role that France could now play. Since at least the time of the Suez venture in 1956 it has been much less subservient to Washington than the UK and at the very least Macron could draw on this Gaullist tradition to demand restraint and a careful examination of the fact before using force. And he could merge this adversarial position with a broader scepticism towards Trump’s policies, urging the US president to sign back into the Paris deal on climate change or to retract his highly provocative decision to recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.
This would be a French mission civilisatrice for the present day, one that win Macron as many plaudits and as much admiration as his Gaullist predecessors did back in 2002 and early 2003 as they tried in vain to stop Bush and Blair from charging head-on into disaster. This, in other words, would have been a golden opportunity for Macron to win his country gloire as well as prevent even more tragedy and bloodshed in the Middle East and perhaps beyond.
RT Howard is the author of ‘Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America 1945-2016’ and ‘Warmongers: How Leaders and their Unnecessary Wars Have Wrecked the Modern World’.
