Nation Topics - Jacques Chirac | The Nation

The author reports on former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix's views on the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blix, the former head of UNMOVIC, the United Nations arms-inspection team in Iraq, is an unlikely poster-person. In his just-published book, "Disarming Iraq," he has not gone out of his way to make friends. The failure to discover WMDs in Iraq, he told "The Nation" in an interview, proves that export controls and rigorous inspection backed by military pressure had already disarmed Iraq before the war. Blix depicts the road to war in Iraq as a chronicle of willful self-delusion practiced by the major antagonists, in which Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush effectively conspired to pretend that Iraq was a military threat. Blix is not in fact certain that the Administration began with invasion in mind. By January 2003, Blix recalls, instead of finding evidence that would justify war, he had his first suspicions that Saddam might be telling the truth. One character who appears prescient about Iraq in Blix's book is Jacques Chirac, whom Blix went to see just before the war. Blix obviously relishes the admission by David Kay, the chief US WMD-hunter who recently resigned, that there were no weapons to be found. As Blix's book shows, for years after leaving the original UN inspection team Kay harshly criticized him and UN inspectors for their alleged failures.

A month after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in April 2003, solemnly affirmed that France would be 'punished' for its opposition to President George W. Bush's war in Iraq, the 'New York Times' reported that 'a midlevel meeting in the White House was called to discuss ways to do so.' That meeting coincided with a marked ratcheting-up of media stories accusing French President Jacques Chirac's government of being in bed with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Jean-David Levitte, France's U.S. Ambassador, denounced a 'disinformation campaign aimed at sullying France's image and misleading the public.' The U.S. boycott campaigns against French products are of major concern to corporate France, Chirac's fervent supporters.

There is the gentler French person, badboy Benoit Duteurtre, author most recently of the novel "Le Voyage en France," which won the 2001 Médici prize. Duteurtre criticizes Europe for proclaiming a high ground in human rights from which to criticize the Americans, as if, he says, to disguise from itself that it belongs to exactly the same world and is mired in identical contradictions. He makes fun of the way the French use the word Disneyland to refer to the entire American polity. President Jacques Chirac--that unsuccessful chameleon--comes in for a smacking, too. In Chirac's speech after September 11, Duteurtre writes, "I heard the inferiority complex of a Europe deprived of its role as world leader but still quick to judge good and evil."

Going into June 1, it was a cliffhanger. That's when the results of the second ballot in the two-stage French parliamentary elections were to be decided, and the suspense broken. But President Jacques Chirac had already lost his bet in the preliminary vote of May 25. The key question at the end of this millennium is whether the so-called American model will be thrust upon Western Europe or whether, in the struggle to defend their welfare state and other social conquests, the Europeans will be driven to invent a radically different society. The French strikers and demonstrators not only forced their government to postpone the offensive against the welfare state; they also showed that one could reject the future the establishment offered.

The article presents information on various social problems in the world. In addition to the AIDS hotline posters that line the Metro stations with grim black-and-white photos of anguished gay men and lonely drug users, Paris has its own municipal anti-AIDS advertisements. Jacques Chirac, France's new conservative President, has proposed raising the minimum wage and increasing the national arts budget. Still, it's the little things that suggest how far the United States has diverged from the rest of the West.

When French President Jacques Chirac announced the resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific, he was sure he would get away with it, and indeed the silence of Western embassies was eloquent. Chirac saw in nuclear testing an opportunity to inherit the Gaullist mantle on the cheap. Whatever one thought of Gaullist grandeur, the bombinette was for the general a weapon in his struggle against U.S. leadership of the Western alliance. Even if the test-ban treaty is signed next year, the French government is not the only one determined to perpetuate and perfect weapons of world destruction.

The article focuses on the political condition of France. France, it may be argued, is split in two, as was shown in the second round of balloting, in which political candidate Jacques Chirac, the champion of the right, finally defeated Lionel Jospin, leader of the left. Or, based on the first ballot, France, torn apart by mass unemployment and frightened by a deregulated world, is much more fragmented than that. The left itself is divided into two parts, one moderate, the other radical, and the right into three roughly equal segments: conservative, bonapartist and semifascist. The real challenge, even for the very flexible Chirac, was to woo the votes of all three at the same time.

All the ingredients are apparently there, but somehow the mayonnaise does not bind. Politician Francois Mitterrand, with his usual tactical skill, is both the umpire of the upcoming French National Assembly elections and the skipper of the Socialist side. The three leaders of the rightist coalitionâ