TWO-WAY STREET ON IRAQ
Artículo de David Ignatius en “The Washington Post” del 04.07.2003
COPPET, Switzerland -- As the death toll mounts in Iraq, the diplomatic quarrel between France and the United States is becoming inexcusable. Both countries should stop trying to teach each other lessons and start looking for solutions.
The latest skirmishes have centered on the United States' efforts to exempt its soldiers from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, a body whose authority the United States rejects. Washington and Paris have been making these waivers a test of loyalty -- widening the European-American divide at a time when reasonable people should be working to reduce it.
Some background: After deciding to pull out of the International Criminal Court last year, the Bush administration began demanding that other countries sign bilateral agreements promising that they wouldn't extradite to the court Americans charged with war crimes. This strikes me as a wrongheaded U.S. position, but it has been met with an equally wrongheaded French response.
When Romania agreed to U.S. requests for a waiver, for example, France reportedly reacted by warning the Romanians that they could be jeopardizing future membership in the European Union. The French are said to have issued a similar warning to at least one Baltic state that hopes to join the EU.
These heavy-handed French tactics are similar to Paris's pressure last spring to dissuade Eastern European countries from supporting U.S. policy in Iraq. The French warned then that pro-American actions were a sign of disloyalty to Europe.
U.S. diplomats claim the French also backtracked on their pledge to exempt from ICC prosecution U.S. troops involved in U.N. peacekeeping missions. The French had signaled they would support an automatic rollover of this exemption when it was drafted last year. But when it came up for renewal in the Security Council last month, the French abstained.
What's particularly galling, say U.S. officials, is that the French negotiated for themselves a seven-year waiver from prosecution by the ICC -- which a French friend tells me makes them the only country to have such blanket immunity. Rather than bickering over the ICC, the French and Americans should find a way to resolve the real source of their tensions: Iraq.
The road back to reality will require each side to eat some crow. Here's my suggestion for two orders of the plat du jour, based on conversations this week with Europeans and Americans at a conference here sponsored by the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
The Americans should start by offering French companies that built parts of Iraq's infrastructure the opportunity to help in reconstruction. That's the quickest way to put the French-engineered Iraqi water and telephone systems back into full operation. Because the French know the systems, they can get to work quickly. That matters, because the United States needs to show results to the Iraqi people, even if they come with a French accent.
At the same time, the Europeans should induce the French to join a reconstruction mission in Iraq organized by the vaunted European Security and Defense Policy -- the EU's fancy name for its planned 60,000-member independent military force. The mission would defuse some post-Iraq tensions in Europe, and in the transatlantic alliance as well.
The ESDP, as the European force is known, is just now taking its first steps -- with a policing operation in Bosnia, a military operation in Macedonia and a French-led military operation in Congo. Like the EU, it is hampered by the fact that it's an animal with 15 heads -- soon to be 25.
What this European force could provide is a little of the "soft power" that the United States so obviously is lacking in Iraq. Specifically, the Europeans could help train a new Iraqi police force, perhaps working alongside interested Arab countries such as Jordan.
This European policing project would offer a way to provide stability in Iraq without directly embracing the U.S. military occupation. The ESDP deployment would also be a face-saving way for France and Germany to "get over it" and put the Iraq issue behind them.
The right person to lead such an effort is Javier Solana, the EU's top security official, who has somehow managed to stay on good terms with Washington and Paris in recent months. The right time to launch it is now, before the situation in Iraq gets any worse.
America clearly needs help in postwar Iraq. The Europeans must recognize that if they continue to stand on the sidelines, savoring America's predicament, they will ultimately find the consequences of an Iraqi failure almost as painful as will the United States.