AWOL in the Terror War
Obstruction from France goes way back
By Richard Chesnoff
France’s participation in the global war on terror has been about as enthusiastic and effective as its 1940 defense along the Maginot Line. Long before George W. Bush appeared on the scene, the French were refusing to join longtime friends and allies in standing up to terrorist threats.
Amazingly—or perhaps not—the French have a tradition of trying to strike their own separate deals with terrorist organizations. On more than one occasion, French security services have even turned a blind eye to the presence in France itself of leading international terrorists.
Mohammed Daoud Odeh, the notorious chief of the PLO hit squad that slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, was invited by the French government to come to Paris to meet with senior Quai d’Orsay officials in early 1977. When word leaked out that this quintessential terrorist was in Europe, American, German, and Israeli intelligence agencies frantically sought French help in nabbing him. But the government of then-president Valery Giscard d’Estaing swept down on Daoud’s safe house, “arrested” him, and hustled him off to the airport where he was placed safely aboard a flight to the shelter of terrorist-loving Algeria.
Since then, socialist president Francois Mitterand and conservative president Jacques Chirac have both stuck to the selfcentered, cynical politics of their predecessors. During the 1980s, one of the world’s most wanted terrorist criminals made so many trips to Paris he could have earned gold frequent-flier status. Lebanese Hezbollah leader Iman Mugniyah is the man who tortured and murdered U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem aboard hijacked TWA flight 847 in June 1985, and is believed to have kidnapped, tortured, and later murdered William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut in the mid ’80s. He is also one of the men held responsible for the death of 63 people in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983.
A CIA operative photographed Mugniyah arriving at Paris’s Orly Airport in 1985. The photographs were passed to the French in an effort to get them to arrest him. It was unsuccessful.
Western intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, were outraged. “The French refusal to grab Mugniyah was as disgusting as it was criminal,” one Western intelligence source told me. Not only had Mugniyah attacked American and Israeli targets, he was also blamed for planning the October 23, 1983 truck bombings against U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, a Hezbollah action that killed 58 French soldiers and 241 U.S. marines, sailors, and soldiers.
Armed by Iran, supported by Syria, and based in Lebanon, Hezbollah has a well-earned reputation as one of the most blood-drenched of the anti-Western Muslim terrorist organizations. Until September 11, 2001, Hezbollah held the dubious distinction of having kidnapped and killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization.
But that murderous reputation and even the memory of the French servicemen buried under tons of rubble in Beirut failed to prevent France from lobbying ferociously within the European Union against adding Hezbollah to the E.U.’s list of international terrorist organizations. The French president personally extended an invitation to Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, to attend a French-sponsored summit of French-speaking nations in Beirut in October 2002.
The wages of ransom
The irony is that despite its shameful record of appeasement of terror, and for all its efforts to make nice with Arab states, France has been abused by terrorists just like other nations. Air France planes were hijacked in 1976 (Israeli commandos freed that one at Entebbe) and in 1994 (the would-be hijackers failed to crash into the Eiffel Tower). Yet another French plane was blown up over the Sahara Desert by Libya in 1989, killing all passengers, most of them French citizens.
French journalists have also not been immune to kidnappings by Arab terrorists—in Lebanon, and more recently in Iraq, where Islamic radicals nabbed two French correspondents and threatened to execute them if France did not rescind its restrictions on girls wearing Islamic scarves in public schools. Their capture was not without its own irony: Both journalists, especially Le Figaro’s George Malbrunot, were known for their overtly pro-Arab reporting.
The dismayed French government responded by sending delegations of French Muslims to Baghdad to plead for their release—and by incessantly conjuring up France’s “friendship” with the Arab world. The two men were finally released after four months, but it is unclear whether, or how much, ransom was paid for them.
Nor has the French homeland itself been spared. Throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, Paris was rocked by a series of bloody bombings in streets, restaurants, and the underground metro—all the work of Islamic extremists. France, with 10 percent of its population being Muslim, now faces a real nightmare: a growing sleeper network of Islamic extremists, including clerics who use local French mosques to extol jihad.
Is this French masochism? No, just another example of the arrogance and self-deception of France. In their myopia, the French remain convinced that they are the grand exception, that they can be immune from terror. Why? Because once upon a long time ago they had a rich history of ties, influence, and colonial control in North Africa and the Middle East. As a result, goes French thinking, they know better than anyone else how to deal with the nations, governments, even terrorists, of the Middle East.
“The problem,” a French diplomat once earnestly told me, “is that you Americans really don’t know how to handle the Arabs; you lack sensitivity to their culture, to their values, and to their perspective on life and world politics. We, on the other hand, know them and understand them. We have a natural affinity.”
It must be that same affinity and deep understanding that resulted in France being forced to flee its former colonies in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in mortal fear—a move that resulted in the displacement of one million French residents of North Africa, who had to leave all their property and belongings behind. Similar Mid East acumen led to France’s loss of influence in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.
It is this same deep sensitivity to international justice that has driven France to become the loudest member of Europe’s anti- Israel squad. It was de Gaulle’s idea that France could re-establish its long-lost power by countering both the Americans and the Soviets and forming a bloc of Third World and neutral nations that France would lead. Arab leaders were quite interested in this scheme. They were delighted with the attention France showered on them, not to mention the goodies they got as part of the package.
Abandon the weak, court the rich
The last real barrier between France and the Arab strongmen it went courting was French support for Israel. So de Gaulle reversed France’s Middle East policy and turned his back on Israel. He chose the spring of 1967—just as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the rest of the Arab world threatened the Jewish state with a “war of annihilation”—to make the change known. The French government publicly opposed any Israeli preemptive action, announced the end of French support for Israel, and imposed an embargo on arms supplies.
When the Jewish state launched a preemptive strike anyway, rather than wait for the Arabs to overrun it as the Germans had overrun France in 1940, de Gaulle castigated Israel. About the same time, France began to use its veto power to oppose Israel in the United Nations. France was now systematically siding with the Arab states on almost all issues.
To some considerable degree this was because there was a lot of money to be made on the Arab side. Arab oil riches were beginning to flow, and the French saw an enormous potential to boost French business as well as French political influence. “Just look at the demographic statistics,” one French official eagerly told me in 1969. The Arab states then had a combined population of over 100 million; tiny Israel had only 3 million. There was both money and political hay to be made in the Arab world.
France successfully developed warm ties with the bosses of many Middle Eastern states through lavish monetary aid and diplomatic coziness. Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and de Gaulle cooperated in attempts to limit American power in the region. France also developed a close relationship with Saddam Hussein.
France simultaneously became ever more anti-Israel. Contemporary French policy, as political commentator Alexandre Adler puts it, “seems to license anti-Semitism.” France’s left-wing Le Monde published a cartoon captioned “History Repeats,” equating an Israeli assault on part of a West Bank town in which Palestinian suicide bombers were based with the Nazi incineration of the Warsaw Ghetto—where 300,000 Jewish civilians were annihilated. Not surprisingly, rashes of anti-Semitic violence pervade France today.
Israel bashing has also become a convenient mechanism for further jabs at France’s very favorite target: the United States. The French intellectual class now argues that Israel and America represent the two biggest threats to world peace. In the United Nations and European Parliament, French delegates lead this argument.
France hung on to the PLO and Arafat with all the tenacity of a Parisian poodle in heat. Speaking at a NATO summit in Istanbul in 2004, Jacques Chirac solemnly declared that the discredited and now deceased Palestinian dictator was the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that no Mid East agreement could be signed without him. The French fawned over the ailing Arafat, who finally died in a French military hospital and was given a ceremonial send-off befitting of a potentate.
Fight the good, protect the bad, make money
France’s aerospace industry has always been a major source of the nation’s export income. During the 1980s and 1990s, military contracts reportedly comprised more than 60 percent of all French aerospace exports. Bellicose nations like Libya, with its ocean of oil wealth and ravenous appetite for military hardware, seemed to represent a potential bonanza for the French aviation business. When I visited Tripoli in 1986 for my first interview with Colonel Qaddafi, the lobby of my hotel was jammed each evening with representatives of terrorist organizations from every corner of the world: Irish separatists, Kurdish nationalists, Palestinian revolutionaries, Sri Lankan bombers.
All were in town for handouts from the Libyans. There were also handouts for some European politicians. Shortly after the 1981 election of president Francois Mitterand, the Libyan dictator began authorizing healthy kickbacks to the campaign coffers of the French Socialist Party and the private accounts of some of the French president’s closest advisers. So it’s not surprising that some within the French government argued vehemently that despite Qaddafi’s support for terrorism, there was no point in burning the golden bridge to Libya.
The most ignoble chapter in France’s indulgence of terror came in April 1986. After a Libyan-sponsored bombing of a West Berlin nightclub patronized by U.S. soldiers, President Ronald Reagan decided to launch a limited air assault to destroy terrorist training camps and military in the North African nation. Not only did France refuse to participate in the strike; it denied overflight rights to American fighter planes en route to Libya. This created long and dangerous diversions for the American pilots.
Reagan was furious. But he ought not have been surprised. “The Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world,” French president Francois Mitterrand once declared. “We are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, a war without death.” A fine ally, with an eagle’s eye for dangerous nations, and a pure and untainted moral vision, wouldn’t you say?
The 2002-2003 U.N. debate on Saddam Hussein’s violations of U.N. resolutions made it clear to the American public just how unfaithful the French could be. Asked who he wanted to win in a war between Saddam and Western allies, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin shockingly replied that he didn’t know. Polls indicated that at least 33 percent of his countrymen did; they were rooting for Saddam Hussein.
Over the last two years, the French media have seemed to relish the death of every American or British soldier in Iraq, to focus on every seeming failure of the coalition. It was that misanthropic spirit that caused the popular centrist French newsmagazine l’Express to title one of its year-end issues, “The Man Who Ruined 2003.” The cover picture wasn’t of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden—it was of George W. Bush.
Soon after U.S. troops pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider-hole hideaway, a column in the influential French leftist daily Liberation moaned that it was “shameful” to display the exdictator with his long beard and straggly hair—not to mention the indelicacy of showing his teeth being examined and his hair searched for cooties. The paper, which has had no constraints about showing the mangled bodies of dead American troops, said Washington should get an “Oscar for Bad Taste.”
Though their selfishness, duplicity, and cowardice in the battle against terrorism is an increasingly obvious fact, the French continue to boast of their self-appointed role as Europe’s conscience. That claim, however, has begun to sicken even a growing number of their fellow Europeans. As British journalist Becky Tinsley has put it, the French may claim to be the civilized counterweight to “brutal American imperialism,” but what they’ve really been doing in the Arab world is “running the cash registers in a Wild West whorehouse.”
Richard Chesnoff, who divides his time between southern France and
New York City, is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.
France’s Soft Spot for Saddam
By John Miller and Mark Molesky
The war on terrorism is said to have begun on September 11, 2001, but in truth it began decades earlier. In a fundamental way, 9/11 awakened Americans to a serious and ongoing problem that the Europeans had failed to contain. The twin challenges of Islamic radicals committing terrorist atrocities and rogue states plotting to acquire weapons of mass destruction could no longer be overlooked. Even after the attacks, however, the U.S. and Europe would spend much of their time arguing not about how to confront these menaces, but whether to confront them at all. In the end, they would find themselves bitterly confronting each other.
The man at the center of the dispute was French President Jacques Chirac. One of the most significant developments in Chirac’s political career was the close personal bond he formed in the 1970s with an ambitious Iraqi official named Saddam Hussein. Vice President Hussein came to France during those years to sign oil contracts and buy weapons—and few were as keen to accommodate him as Chirac. Over several years, the two men met frequently in Baghdad and Paris while brokering a massive set of trade agreements that had Iraq supplying France with 700 million barrels of oil over ten years and spending billions on French military equipment, including tanks, missiles, and Mirage F-1 fighters. In addition, Iraq agreed to buy 100,000 French made cars and invited French companies to develop a billion-dollar resort complex near Baghdad. Hussein, of course, wanted something in return: French assistance in building a nuclear reactor that could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium. Chirac was so eager to oblige that Hussein’s infamous Osirak nuclear reactor earned the nickname O’Chirac among French critics of the deal.
There was ample cause for concern. “The agreement with France is the first concrete step toward production of the Arab atomic bomb,” stated Hussein ominously. In 1981, the Israeli government came to believe the plant posed a threat to its national survival, and so they destroyed it in a daring airstrike. Although many now view the raid as an act of providential foresight, at the time most governments (including the United States) criticized the attack. Few issued more vituperative condemnations than Paris: “Unacceptable, dangerous, and a serious violation of international law,” said foreign minister Claude Cheysson.
The French continued to support Hussein, and French companies sold more than $20 billion in military and civilian materials to Iraq in the early 1980s, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all French military exports. By the time Hussein turned his rapacious gaze to Kuwait in the summer of 1990, France had supplied the dictator with about one-quarter of his military arsenal. Only the Soviet Union had done more to arm him. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 turned French thinking about the Middle East on its head. Smaller than Vermont, Kuwait had done nothing to provoke the attack other than sit atop oil reserves that Hussein coveted for himself. Within 12 hours, the little country on the western shore of the Persian Gulf fell to the overpowering force of Iraqi arms. Thousands of foreign nationals from the United States and Europe became Hussein’s hostages.
France had stopped arms sales to Iraq some months earlier— not because of any moral or foreign policy qualms, but because Hussein had fallen nearly $5 billion behind on his payments. This debt, however, did nothing to stop French leaders from praising the Baathist tyrant and long-time friend of France. “President Saddam Hussein has a clear and interesting outlook, which he qualifies by leading his people towards peace,” said French defense minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement nonsensically in February 1990.
Chevenement was just the sort of man to overlook Hussein’s brutality, which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in hundreds of incidents. The French defense minister was one of many of his countrymen who praised Hussein as a latter-day Jacobin. Chevenement had also been a founding member of the Franco- Iraqi Friendship Alliance, a shadowy group that promoted business contacts between the two countries and was believed to have spent millions of francs buying influence in Paris. When Iraq needed to be punished for invading Kuwait, France found itself in the awkward position of having an admirer of Hussein in charge of their military establishment.
President George H. W. Bush nevertheless wanted the French to serve as full partners in an international coalition against Iraq. This was easier said than done. Hussein devised a diplomatic strategy for driving a wedge between Anglo-American resolve and French vacillation. In October, Iraq released all 330 of its French hostages in Kuwait, while retaining thousands of American and British citizens. Suspicions abounded that France had engaged in secret talks with Hussein and cut a special deal for French hostages. It was known that in August one of France’s special envoys—Claude Cheysson, the man who had reproached Israel for destroying Iraq’s nuclear facility a decade earlier—had traveled to Tunis, met with Yasser Arafat, and asked the PLO leader to intervene personally with Hussein on behalf of the French captives.
As the months wore on, France eventually assembled a military force in the Gulf and cooperated on a Security Council resolution authorizing war if Iraq did not leave Kuwait by January 15. ButFrance refused to follow the lead of other coalition members and place its 10,000 soldiers under U.S. command. To emphasize their independence from the coalition, the French had their top officer report instead to Saudi commander Prince Khaled. Chevenement also made sure French forces were stationed far from U.S. bases, apparently to disassociate themselves even further. Then on January 29, Chevenement resigned his post. He had tried to quit twice before in objection to his country’s decision to fight Iraq, but both times Francois Mitterand refused to let him go.
When, after expelling his army from Iraq, the coalition mulled removing Saddam Hussein from power, there was no way to count on French participation. Hussein was left in control of Iraq. And he continued to count on French protection. When the so-called Duelfer Report was released last year, it concluded that France’s coziness with Iraq encouraged Saddam’s intransigence, and thus helped spark the second Iraq war. Because of his long ties to Chirac and the French, furthered by the bribes he extended to French companies and leaders through the U.N.’s corrupt Oil-for-Food program, Saddam expected that France would go to great lengths to block any U.S. military action against him. He was right. The surprise was that George W. Bush would eventually act despite the French obstruction.
The French continue to cast their lot more with Iraqi terrorists than with the U.S.-led coalition opposing them. While negotiating the release of some French hostages being held in Iraq a few months ago, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin stated that “The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies.” That’s the kind of behavior that leads many Americans to wonder whether France is a friend or an adversary.
This is adapted from the authors’ book Our Oldest Enemy: A History of
America’s Disastrous Relationship with France.
Europe, Thy Name Is Cowardice
By Mathias Doepfner
A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, “Europe—your family name is appeasement.” It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head, because it’s so terribly true.
Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.
Appeasement legitimized and stabilized communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe where for decades, inhuman, suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.
Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing massmurder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us.
Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement…generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush.... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, tens of billions, in the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program.
And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a “Muslim holiday” in Germany.
I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of our German government, and if the polls are to be believed, the German people, actually believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of the fanatical Islamists.
One cannot help but recall Britain’s Neville Chamberlain waving the laughable treaty signed by Adolph Hitler, and declaring European “Peace in our time.”
What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade under way, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open Western societies, and intent upon Western civilization’s utter destruction.
It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than any of the great military conflicts of the last century—a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by “tolerance” and “accommodation” but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which…will always be taken by the Islamists for signs of weakness….
Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic war against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.
In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society’s values….
We Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those “arrogant Americans”, as the world champions of “tolerance”…. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic, so devoid of a moral compass.
For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt, and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy, because unlike almost all of Europe, Bush realizes what is at stake—literally everything.
[We Europeans say:] Stay out of it! It could get expensive! We’d rather discuss reducing our 35-hour workweek…or listen to TV pastors preach about the need to “Reach out to terrorists, to understand and forgive.”
These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor’s house.
Appeasement? Europe, thy name is cowardice.
At the end of 2004, Mathias Doepfner, CEO of German publishing conglomerate Axel Springer, wrote an editorial for the influential newspaper Die Welt blasting Europe for its timidity in confronting Islamic fanaticism.
