FRANKS AND BEANS:

French Struggle Now With How to Coexist With Bush (ELAINE SCIOLINO, 2/07/05, NY Times)

[E]ven as Mr. Chirac and his ministers adjust to the reality of a second Bush term, they hold fast to a belief that Mr. Bush and his team still have a lot to learn from France about running the world.

In a meeting a week ago at Élysée Palace with five American senators, for instance, Mr. Chirac repeated his conviction that a "multipolar world" with multiple centers of power is not a desire or an aspiration but "a fact," three participants said.

That description of the world enrages Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice because it seems to envision a power that competes with American interests and influence, even though Mr. Chirac also says the best way to make the multipolar world as stable as possible is by strengthening the trans-Atlantic relationship.

"He still doesn't like the idea of the unipolar world with the United States as top dog," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat, said in an interview after the meeting.

The senators came away from the meeting with Mr. Chirac and a meeting with Mr. de Villepin, who is now interior minister but still weighs in on foreign policy, convinced that France has not yet accepted that some of its dire predictions on Iraq may turn out to be wrong.

Both men have argued fiercely that the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has made the region much more dangerous. Now there is an effort to calibrate French policy while still asserting France's historic influence in the Middle East.

Mr. Chirac made clear to the senators that France had supported the American-led debt relief proposal for Iraq and had formally proposed to Iraq that it would train 1,500 Iraqi policemen, but outside Iraq.

On the other hand, he seemed taken aback by the high voter turnout in the election, criticized the Bush administration for disbanding the Iraqi Army and reaffirmed that French soldiers would not set foot in Iraq.

"My read of Chirac, as a plain old politician, is that he was saying, 'O. K., you did better than we thought you'd do,' " Mr. Biden said. "I think he was saying: 'I'm not ready to step in and do the heavy lifting with boots on the ground. But you might make it, so I want to get in on the deal.' He's calculating he wants to keep one foot on the platform and one foot on the train because the train might leave."

Mr. Chirac also seems to be struggling to explain his policy on Iran. France, together with Britain and Germany and with European Union support, began a negotiating process to persuade Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment activities in exchange for economic and political rewards.

Mr. Chirac told the American senators that if Iran did not comply with demands made by the International Atomic Energy Agency, France would support the Bush administration's demand to refer the case to the United Nations Security Council, where, if the United States has its way, Iran could face possible censure or even sanctions.

But Mr. Chirac made it clear, they said, that sanctions never worked and that he was opposed to them. He also suggested that Iran's Islamic Republic could not be trusted.

"Chirac told us he believes you can deal with the Sunnis but not with the Shiites," one participant in the meeting paraphrased him as saying. Iran's population is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim.

Élysée Palace declined to comment on the conversation. [...]

At one point in the meeting with the senators, he said he would love to have some private time with Mr. Bush, without any aides present, when the two men dine together in Brussels as part of Mr. Bush's trip to Europe later this month.

"Several of us said that would be a great idea, to try to start over again," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said in an interview after the meeting.

But another participant said perhaps that was not such a good idea, noting that in some of their previous meetings, Mr. Chirac has pointed his finger at Mr. Bush and lectured him on what he does not know.

Which is more foolish: the notion that France is a world power or that Jean-Claude has something to teach George Bush?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2005 09:10 PM