A tale of two stories

In Thursday's edition of the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash seizes on the first impulse of all good Europeans-to look at what the United States is doing and decry it as the 'wrong' thing. In this case, Ash looks at how the United States is handling the Iran situation and finds us sorely lacking.

So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.
So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.

Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil". Now he says "the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons". The world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy, preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!

To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that there are no good options for strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, only bad or worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack. Many people suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran's nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was ready to.

Ash goes on...and on...and on finding fault with President Bush and the United States. It is fiskable, but that's not my purpose at the moment. Instead, let's look at something that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post, an article by David Ignatius which received far less attention than it deserved in my opinion.

Once every five or six weeks, a French presidential adviser named Maurice Gourdault-Montagne flies to Washington to meet with his American counterpart, national security adviser Stephen Hadley. They spend several hours coordinating strategy on Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other hot spots, and then the Frenchman flies home. In between trips, the two men talk often on the phone, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Welcome to the French Connection. Though the link between the top foreign policy advisers of Presidents Bush and Jacques Chirac is almost unknown to the outside world, it has emerged as an important element of U.S. planning. On a public level, France may still be the butt of jokes among American politicians, but in these private diplomatic contacts, the Elysee Palace has become one of the White House's most important and effective allies.

During a visit here this week, I had a chance to talk with French sources who know some of the closely held details. It's an intriguing story of back channels and secret missions, but it illustrates a larger change in America's approach: Bruised by the war in Iraq, the administration is now working hard to conduct its foreign policy in tandem with international allies and, where possible, through the United Nations.

3 years ago Europe was begging the United States to be more diplomatic and to involve its world partners in keeping peace through negotiations. Today, the United States is playing a high level diplomatic game of good cop-bad cop with France as its partner, and in some quarters in Europe the criticism is that we are not banging the drums of war. Here is the moral of the story. Europe and much of the rest of the world expect the United States to take care of all of the world's messes. They don't want to get there own hands dirty, and they certainly don't ever want to acknowledge that the United States is sacrificing its own blood and treasure while they sit back and benefit from our actions. Europe right now is a little bit more sober of a place because Europeans are beginning to understand that radical Islam is perhaps a bigger threat to them than it is to us. But that doesn't stop them from complaining about everything we do, and the reason they complain is because while they are really beholden and reliant upon us for their security, they will never admit it. Complaining gives the appearance that they have the wherewithal and independence to act or not on their own will, so it is a matter of pride and image that they do so. That is why, while we should seek the advice and consent of the European nations, we should not consider their intransigence as a veto on our actions.