France moves in the right direction

Amir Taheri:

ONE key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct foreign-policy mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent Iraq's liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

Sarkozy's moves to correct the mistake started before his election, when he met President Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac's policy as "arrogant."

The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s.

In fact, Kouchner, a medical doctor by training, partly made his public image by helping the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees who fled from Saddam's tyranny in the 1970s and the 1990s.

For years, Medecins sans Frontiers, the organization that Kouchner and his friends founded, was one of the few Western charities that publicized the sufferings of the Iraqi peoples.

As a result, when he arrived in Baghdad the other day, Kouchner was among friends. He also had an opportunity to lay a wreath at a monument to one of his oldest friends, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations' first emissary to Iraq, who was murdered by al Qaeda almost exactly four years ago.

Kouchner's visit, full of symbolism, shatters one of the key points in al Qaeda's analysis: that the Western democracies will never unite to develop a common strategy against terror. At one point, when Chirac invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin to a gathering to forge an anti-American triple alliance, al Qaeda's analysis appeared plausible.

Now, however, both Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Sarkozy understand that the perception of Western disunity may be one of the factors that prolongs the conflict in Iraq.

As long as al Qaeda and the Ba'athist bitter-enders believe that Western divisions might destroy the U.S.-led coalition, they will have an incentive to continue the fight. Once they lose that incentive, they might well decide that, with Iraq unlikely to fall, they had better look for alternative strategies in their global jihad.

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Al Qaeda still has the Democrats to give hope to their hopeless ambitions. With the removal of the corrupt Chirac regime, France at least has an honest government with people of good will in charge. that is a huge change for the better.

Unfortunately Vladimir Putin is stepping into the breach left by Chirac and is probably worse. He appears to be forging an alliance with China and Iran against a non existent threat to Russia. It is Russian paranoia at its worst.

Tony Corn talks about the realignment, but I think he makes a mistake by putting India in that orbit. The Indians are closer to the US than they have ever been and it is a mutually beneficial relationship.