Is France Right?(on Iraq)

What's wrong with the Iraqis? The United States and Britain freed them from Saddam Hussein and, sure, the vast majority says that's great. A Gallup poll, released last week, found that 62 percent think liberty is worth the hardship. But they don't much like their liberators. The same poll shows their preferred country by far is--get this--France. And their favorite leader? Jacques Chirac. The French president's approval rating tops George W. Bush's by 13 points in Baghdad. Tony Blair couldn't get elected dogcatcher.

It would be a mistake to read too much into this. Polls are just political beauty contests. But clearly it's a milestone on Chirac's road to the title of Mr. Un-America. In the months since the Iraq crisis began, France has shrewdly positioned itself not so much as the enemy of the United States but as the standard-bearer for everyone on the globe who doesn't share the Bush administration's with-us-or- against-us world view. Righteous crusades against Evil, the French warned, can have evil consequences of their own. Even the best- intentioned occupiers of foreign lands will find themselves reviled by people anxious to control their own destinies.

How Gaulling, for the Americans, that the French could be proved right. When Paris tried to slow or stop America's rush to invade Iraq--arguing that there were better ways than war to find Baghdad's sup-posed weapons of mass destruction--it was denounced by Americans as petty and obstructionist. Nine months later, the French position looks prudent, even prescient. War has uncovered no WMD, and the cost in blood and treasure has been enormous.

Today France is at it again. Playing to the court of world opinion, it demands that the United States hand over Iraqi sovereignty to the Iraqis as soon as possible. Why? Though it speaks of empowering Iraqis, France really fears that America might stay in Iraq for the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future. The United States isn't giving in. Addressing the United Nations, President Bush declared that peace and stability could best be reached by "an orderly and democratic process... neither hurried nor delayed by other parties." Turning Iraq over to the newly appointed and weak Governing Council, say U.S. officials, will only ensure chaos and instability.

As the French see it, the Americans are riding the proverbial tiger, afraid to dismount. "Things are not happening as they expected, to put it politely," says one senior French official. "It's in the interest of all ...