How deep is the rift? When squabbling turns too dangerous / The row in NATO: A fractured alliance

Date: 15/02/03

Far more lies behind Europe's disarray than honest disagreement

“THERE are moments in history when the judgment and resolve of free nations are put to the test. This is such a moment.” America's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is quite right: this is such a moment. As protesters planned their marches in cities across Europe to oppose a war with Iraq, and as the United Nations Security Council awaited another report on Iraq's behaviour from Hans Blix, its chief weapons inspector, a huge international row still raged over what best to do.

Dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is straining the transatlantic alliance, NATO and the European Union as few other issues have done. Yet it started with an apparently unanimous resolve to press Iraq to disarm. How did the would-be disarmers end up at each other's throats?

On the surface, the dispute is a practical one. All agree that Iraq must be parted from its weapons of mass destruction. Resolution 1441, passed unanimously by the Security Council in November, proclaimed Iraq in material breach of the obligations to disarm imposed on it 12 years ago after the Gulf war. But it gave the regime of Saddam Hussein “a final opportunity” to comply. Failure to do so would bring “serious consequences”: meaning, in well understood diplomatic code, disarmament by force.

But that was already an uneasy compromise. It spanned those, including a number of President George Bush's senior advisers, who assumed Iraq could not be disarmed except by force; those, like Britain and now an increasing number of other European governments, who were ready to see force used if Iraq refused to disarm; those prepared to go along with the threat of force in the hope that Iraq would finally cave in (or Mr Hussein would be dislodged from power) without a shot fired; and those who went along with a tough resolution only because they did not want to see the UN's credibility damaged by unilateral American action. These last two groups overlap considerably and appear, for now, to include France, Germany, Russia and China.

Ever since Mr Blix first reported back to the council on January 27th, when he concluded that Iraq “appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance...of the disarmament that was demanded of it,” its unity has dissolved. America and Britain argue that without immediate and full compliance, Iraq will be in further breach of its UN obligations, and force must be applied. But France and Germany, abetted by Russia and China, are digging their heels in.

“Project Mirage”, indeed

This week, at the UN, France circulated a “non-paper” - not a draft for a new resolution, but an attempt to embellish the existing one. It was a cut-down version of a supposedly “secret” French-German plan that was leaked, to huge consternation, during an informal security meeting of senior American and European officials in Munich last weekend. The proposals recommend, as an alternative to war and a way to contain Iraq, a doubling or tripling of the number of inspectors there at any given time; extra surveillance aircraft, to be sent by France and Russia; extra experts and translators; and more personnel not just to secure the inspectors' bases, but to monitor and “freeze” sites under inspection. All these enhancements, the paper said, would “compel Iraq to co-operate.”

Germany, not a veto-wielding member of the council but its current chairman, claims to have done a head-count and found that 11 of the 15 council members support extending inspections, rather than resorting to force. Possibly. Plenty of diplomatic arm-twisting remains to be done before a decision is made on any further resolutions, and the White House declared on February 12th that it was busy discussing the wording of a new one. Of the 15 council members, only five hold a veto (America, Britain, China, France and Russia). In order to pass, any resolution must win nine votes and no vetoes. And though Russia and China have aligned themselves with France and Germany for now, arguing that all peaceful solutions must be tried first, neither is as rock-solid as France and Germany might like.

What is more, say American officials, obvious logical flaws bedevil the French proposals. How, for example, might Iraq be made to disarm by peaceful means, when peaceful means have so patently failed over 12 years and 17 previous resolutions? “Project Mirage”, the name France gave to its new proposals, was quickly dismissed by both America and Britain as just that.

Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, says such ideas are a fundamental misreading of Resolution 1441. The onus is on Iraq to disarm, not on the inspectors to catch him out; and if he maintains his refusal to co-operate, how will higher numbers help? Such proposals, claimed Mr Straw, “represent the clearest admission yet that Iraq is not co-operating.”

Mr Blix agreed this week that Iraq's non-readiness to disarm remained the nub of the problem. He summoned missile experts to try to determine whether recent Iraqi goings-on, including the importing of missile engines and the testing of missiles beyond permitted ranges, offended against Resolution 1441. They decided they did. Iraq has now handed him more documents about its chemical and biological efforts, though there is said to be nothing new in them, and has agreed at last to let U2 intelligence-gathering aircraft fly over Iraq, as Resolution 1441 demanded. But although the inspectors welcome such signs of willingness on procedure, they still need active co-operation on substance: that is, full disclosure of all weapons, materials and documents. If Iraq fails to change on that score, Mr Blix's report is unlikely to get it off the hook.

That has not stopped France and Germany claiming that inspections are having some effect. Hence their argument, likely to be made again after Mr Blix presents his report on Friday, that with more time and more powers for the inspectors, even better progress could be made.

The deeper trouble

All this could be seen as nothing more than an honest, if deep, disagreement among friends. But the pitch of anger in this debate proves there is much more to it than that.

France and Germany were incensed when, two weeks ago, Britain, Italy, Spain and a clutch of other European governments (followed by ten more from eastern and south-eastern Europe) affirmed their backing for America. Since the EU had issued a joint, and more restrained, statement on Iraq only a few days earlier, this was seen as treachery in Paris and Berlin.

Yet the move to support America was itself a response to events that seemed, to others, to be aimed at sabotaging the effort to put pressure on Iraq. First came the decision - made by Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, without consulting anyone else - to rule out any German participation in military action, even under a UN mandate. Then followed the long weeks of negotiation at the UN, in which America bent over backwards to bring the French and others along with Resolution 1441, only for France's president, Jacques Chirac, and Mr Schröder to try their sudden joint blocking manoeuvre.

In fact, both governments have genuine concerns about the course of American policy. Unlike Germany, France has not ruled out the use of force entirely, but like Germany it worries about the effect of a conflict on the fragile Middle East, about the economic impact at home, and about hostility to a war among Muslims, 4m-5m of whom live in France.

Until now, France has always relished facing down America more than Germany has. But Mr Schröder, too, has recently stressed to his party followers that the spat can be seen as an issue of “European sovereignty” - in other words, whether America alone should be able to determine the course of events. France and Germany both worry about America's claim to a right to pre-emptive action to deal with new threats from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

It was Mr Schröder, however, who leaked the news that he was working with Mr Chirac on new proposals designed to avoid the use of force in Iraq. Unfortunately he leaked it to the press before consulting either the Bush administration or his other allies on its substance, or evidently his own foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, on the timing, thus causing maximum offence all round. He then further angered eastern European governments, who will soon be joining both NATO and the EU, by including the Russians (whom many of them still distrust) in his consultations in preference to them. As one western European official summed up the European end of the row this week: “France and Germany do not seem to realise that their claim to leadership in Europe does not extend to foreign policy.”

Thus a scheme that Mr Schröder had hoped might put Germany back closer to the mainstream, by coupling it with France and Russia, appeared to backfire. His mishandling of the French-German plan on inspections, combined with Germany's refusal, along with France and Belgium, to let NATO begin planning to defend Turkey in a war with Iraq, has brought down a barrage of criticism, both from his conservative opponents in the Bundestag and from virtually all sections of the German press. Although the Germans largely oppose a war, they also, unlike the French, have long thought kindly of America, Germany's close ally and chief defender during the cold war. NATO and the EU, now badly divided by the row, are central to Germany's view of where it fits in the world. There is now a growing chorus for Mr Schröder to step down for his poor handling of both Iraq and Germany's sickly economy.

France's game

Mr Chirac faces no such pressures. On the contrary, he seems determined to press his argument with America to the hilt. He insists that the argument is really about ensuring that the UN retains the ultimate say over how to deal with Iraq. But that claim is starting to ring increasingly hollow. Having subscribed to a tough resolution that was meant to pile pressure on Iraq, Mr Chirac's attempts to vary the inspection regime and to shift the onus on to the inspectors releases some of that pressure and makes the Security Council look indecisive. If France presses its opposition to the point of vetoing any effort to back up Resolution 1441 with force, then America will probably bypass the UN altogether, making it look feebler still.

Until now, France's allies in NATO have seen it as a “bad-weather friend” - carping and difficult over many things, but ready to help out in a crunch. But Mr Chirac, who seems to have taken day-to-day control of France's diplomacy on the issue, appears to see this dispute as a personal mission to clip America's wings. He might have got away with that if the rest of Europe had rallied to his cause. But most of it hasn't. As American officials have been quick to point out, Europeans are more divided among themselves than Europeans and Americans are.

Those less inclined to believe in Mr Chirac's self-professed high-mindedness see France as merely a spoiler. They note that France and Russia both have considerable economic interests in Iraq. Russia is owed some $8 billion in past debts. And both French and Russian companies have been striking oil deals with Mr Hussein's regime, although agreements cannot be implemented while Iraq remains under UN sanctions. This week Iraq cancelled a production-sharing agreement with Lukoil, a Russian company, possibly in retaliation for earlier comments by President Vladimir Putin that Russia could yet toughen its stance if Iraq hampered the weapons inspectors.

American officials, for their part, worry that France, Germany and Russia want to prolong inspections in Iraq as a way of simply avoiding the “serious consequences” of Resolution 1441. They are also genuinely put out and frustrated that, having listened to their European allies, including the French, and tried to deal with the Iraq problem multilaterally through the UN, Messrs Chirac and Schröder now appear to be trying to sabbotage these efforts. Other Europeans worry too that by raising the costs to America of operating multilaterally, the French and Germans are undercutting America's chief multilateraliser, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and reinforcing the arguments of those in the Bush administration who have long held that operating through the UN, and even NATO, crimps America's freedom of action. That hard-line camp, with Mr Rumsfeld at its head, feels pretty well vindicated now.

The damage to European and European-American ties will not be quickly mended. Greece, which currently holds the presidency of the EU, has called an emergency heads-of-government summit next week, to try to bring Europe back to a common position on Iraq. Unless Europeans can manage that, they will not be listened to, goes the argument. But there is little sign that the squabbling countries can be induced to agree. And America has made it clear that there are some European voices it is getting quite tired of hearing.

With not a shot fired, the Iraq crisis has imposed serious strains on the Atlantic Alliance, NATO, the UN and the EU.