Thursday, 10 April 2003

We now return you to our regularly scheduled warblogging, or at least we would, except that the "war" part is in delightfully short supply at the moment. The BBC is broadcasting live footage of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags and setting fire to Saddam posters (ain't that a switch?), and the talking heads are rapidly moving to questions of administering post-Saddam Iraq and whether the United Nations will get a piece of the action. We still don't know if Saddam is dead or not—but even if he's alive, his hold over Iraq is broken forever.

Speaking of post-war talking heads, though, I'm going to take a moment here and tweak Steven Den Beste over at the USS Clueless, because one of his patron saints just came out and agreed with me in a Washington Post article:

There is a strong impulse in the administration right now to punish erstwhile allies in Europe who opposed the war. A certain righteous triumphalism in Washington is to be expected, and payback is a normal human desire. But this is the time for a little self-interested magnanimity.

That's the voice of Robert Kagan, one of the featured authors in Den Beste's Essential Library. Go read the whole article, and then review last month's exchange between Steven and myself on the question whether America's foreign policy goals are best achieved via punishment or persuasion. Kagan continues:

So why not make amends in Europe? Of course Bush should reward those who took risks to support him, especially Tony Blair. And it won't be possible to do much business with France so long as the Chirac government continues to present itself as the builder of a great counterweight to the United States. But if the United States looks like it's asking Europeans to choose between being "European" and being pro-American, we'll fail. The European Union is still the dominant political institution in European society, and Blair is trying to knit back his own tattered relations with Europe. Punishing the rejectionist Europeans won't help him.

Exactly. We certainly shouldn't reward Chirac's France, and we shouldn't treat his government as a trusted friend and ally—but there's a real possibility ahead that America will overplay its hand, and give Chirac the chance he's actively seeking: To play David against America's Goliath, victim against America's bully, and counter-weight against American leadership. We're facing a political battle against France, not a military one... and you don't defeat a political opponent by "punishing" her, but by winning away her supporters.

When we last discussed the issue, Steven argued that "even if reprisals against the French harm us, that harm will be less than the harm we would suffer if we don't respond at all, encouraging other nations to cross us the same way." I frankly see little value in having "allies" who stand by our side because they fear to do otherwise, and I don't see other nations eagerly lining up to "cross us," as Steven puts it. What I see is a post-war Iraq that absolutely requires the use of soft power—we can't build a stable democracy in Iraq if the majority of people there become hostile to our efforts—and a situation where following through on the impulse to "punish" France would reduce our soft power at the time we need it most.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:17 am. comments.