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A French lesson for Blair and Bush There's a reason France sat out the Iraq war

We're more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

We're more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)


September 10, 2021   4 mins

On 12 September 2001, Le Monde, the bulletin board of the French political and intellectual elites, carried a front page shocker signed by its editor-in-chief. Its headline — in the country of Charles de Gaulle! — was “We are all Americans.”

“How could we not feel, as in the darkest times in our history, a deep solidarity with the people of the United States, to whom we are so close, and to whom we owe our freedom?” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani, possibly the then-most powerful opinion-maker in France, in that special grandiloquent style the French adopt to signal momentous thought. In the next paragraph, he warned the West not to fall for the “monstrous hypocrisy” of “finding excuses for the perpetrators of this murderous madness, crediting them with the ‘good intentions’… to avenge the wretched of the world against their supposed sole oppressor, America… They do not want a better, fairer world. They simply want to wipe ours off the map.”

Strong words after the shock of 9/11. The last paragraph of this 1250-word tirade did warn, accurately as it turned out, against escalation — “[the terrorists’] attitude is obviously suicidal. By going to the extremes, they want to force Muslim opinions to ‘choose sides’ against ‘the great Satan’ [and] to spread an unprecedented crisis throughout the Arab world. They want to attract the whirlwind. Our leaders must see the danger of causing the nations these warmongers covet to buy into this suicidal logic.”

Le Monde duly supported the French government’s October 2001 decision to join both the US-led military coalition for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as the NATO international security task force. This, despite France not being bound by NATO’s charter (having been spectacularly pulled out of the Organisation by Charles de Gaulle in 1966), was met by popular support that never rose to jingoism. Both Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president, and Lionel Jospin, the Socialist PM he’d been forced to take on when his party lost the surprise 1997 General Election, were for once in agreement. France sent 4,000 crack troops. By 2010, the French were the fourth largest contributor to the war in Afghanistan (after the US, UK and Italy).

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable, acknowledged by both the Americans and the British. French investigative magistrates draw on over half a century’s experience with every variety of bloody attacks: during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-1960s; Left-wing Palestinian in the 1970s; Iranian in the 1980s; Algerian again in the 1990s as France became the hinterland of the 1992-2000 civil war in her former colony. When 9/11 came, only the scope of it was different from what the juges d’instruction had been working on for decades.

The French decision to leave Afghanistan in 2012, was met with relative public indifference, which is a more normal response The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specific measurements, states (Art. 15) that the President of the Republic is “the head of the armed forces, decides on the use of military force and to this end has the responsibility and the power to engage nuclear forces if necessary”. Essentially, the otherwise-ornery French have left successive presidents to it. Even before Jacques Chirac put an end to conscription in 2002, there were next to no protests when the French military, including conscripts, were deployed in Lebanon, Chad, Kosovo or Bosnia.

The French see their military (and nuclear capacity) as part of a cherished mental dreamland: it’s the last acceptable refuge of the Grandeur invoked from Louis XIV to Le Général. This Grandeur sublimates France from mid-size power to major player, with a seat at the Security Council, an impressive armaments industry for a country of 67 million people, a capacity of foreign deployment roughly similar to the UK’s (currently 17,000 troops from the North Sea to the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and the Baltics), and the respect of her soldierly peers. From the 19th century, the French Army, whose officers signally refused to back populist leaders like Général Boulanger, has been known as La Grande Muette (The Great Mute): this held during the Algerian Independence war when two generals-led military coups ended in ignominious failure. It’s the civilians, not the military, who, from Danton to the Yellow vests, try to overturn the Republic.

Predictably, perhaps, the post World Trade Center transatlantic love affair soured fast. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s grand-standing Foreign Secretary (an obsessive collector of Napoleoniana, he has taken on some of the traits of his hero), came to speak to the UN General Assembly one year after the attacks, on 12 September 2002, and again on 14 February 2003, to urge jaw-jaw and not war. He brushed off any illusion that, after Afghanistan, France would also join the coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein from his quarter century iron rule over Iraq. The French sat out the Iraqi war, earning themselves a variety of soubriquets, the nicest of which, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, had been stolen from The Simpsons.

As it turned out, France was right, but for an unholy combination of cleverness and wrong-headedness. The French, who over the years had furnished Saddam with some $5.1 billion’s worth of weapons for his eight-year-war against Iran, not including the making of his fledgling nuclear capacity, also knew that Germany had built the plants that enabled Iraq to manufacture the Sarin and Tabun gas that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. In other words, if anyone knew that Saddam Hussein was in the process of obtaining WMD, they sat in government offices in Paris — none more so than Jacques Chirac, who’d started cultivating the Baath ruler of Iraq since 1974. The French pushback against “Iraqi Freedom”, which would turn out to be an inspired decision, and keep us out of that mess, was more motivated by deep cynicism than by the romantic illusion that deposing a brutal Middle-Eastern dictator would start “a virtuous circle of democracy” in the area. (Prof. Bernard Lewis’s phrase.)

Like every French president and Foreign secretary since de Gaulle, Chirac and Villepin prided themselves in understanding what they saw as the realities of the Middle East. The Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, has long pushed la politique arabe de la France. This is a mix of heady Gallic Orientalism, cold calculations (all those Mirage and Super-Étendard planes, Exocet missiles, helicopters, air-to-surface guided missiles, and more), power assessment, and entrenched underlying anti-Americanism (which often lumps the British in the Anglo-Saxon package).

It’s also arguable that the practice of French politics (the alliances, the reversals, the treasons, the conviction that idealism is for mugs) is much closer to Near East traditions than to the Jeffersonian (or Burkean) approach. It remains that French scepticism, in this instance, was inspired.

That isn’t to say that France will never ever engage in an ill-advised war. But if that does happen, you can bank on her reasons being a lot more complicated than the George and Tony show.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based journalist and political commentator.

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A Spetzari
A Spetzari
3 years ago

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable

Hmm yes and no. French foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century up until Iraq had been a catalogue of unmitigated disasters, failed interventions and decolonisation projects.
To paraphrase a friend of mine; sure you can learn a lot from failure – but you learn a f**k-load more from success.
I think for the UK at least Blair was seduced in part by our military’s post war track record – which was by and large exemplary – from Malaya, to Borneo, Oman to Belize, the Falklands to the first Gulf war. Sure, the UK was in decline but that fact didn’t seem to be apparent to the military.
Then more recently “Blair’s” own successes in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Macedonia had convinced him (and us to a degree) that we were the more effective, capable and humane little brother to America’s “World Police”. Add to that Northern Ireland – which was a mixed catalogue of results but Blair had (in his mind no doubt) “fixed” that too.
We would be proven awfully and terribly wrong on all of this, not least because the political and military establishment categorically underestimated the task in hand in Iraq.
But back to the point – France’s history of failures was why they didn’t want to get involved. Not really because of some savvy politicking. They weren’t good at it and they knew it. At the other end of the spectrum we had started believing our own hype.

Last edited 3 years ago by A Spetzari
Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

France was also grappling with FIS, GIA and other more proximate threats on its doorstep with advance 9/11 terror waves ahead of our own. Failure or not, and cynical maybe, it probably saw the risk of Iraq escalation as it tried to assimilate a new and largely-Algerian popn of 3m from its ex-colony – quite apart from the risks of launching wars on false premises outside the law. Little has changed in some respects and France is very divided still.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Mark Falcoff
Mark Falcoff
3 years ago

I always say it’s possible to be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons. In this case France was in the first category, the US and Britain in the second.

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Falcoff

Personally I don’t think the US, or the neo conservatives wanted or expected democracy in Iraq. That was a lie for the plebs. They just wanted a power vacuum.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
3 years ago

No mention of the fact that Saddam and the US (Rumsfeld & Co.) were best buddies as long as Saddam danced to the US tune: like Bin Laden was the US’s ally in the war against the Russians. Why not accept:
1. The US makes friends with the most reprehensible monsters on Earth, to protect US interests, ie commercially rape those countries.
2. When finished using them (or they become non US arselickers) they discard them at their peril.
3. The US then unleashes crude all-out war and ends up alienating the civilian population (largely as a result of murdering and torturing so many: duh).
4. And are then surprised that everyone hates the US. If they invade my country and kill thousands of my countrymen (for any reason).. I will hate them too: surprisingly?

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Or is it that American dependence on oil means that the Arabs have them by the short and curlies?

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

Another good article, and an interesting reminder of French realpolitik amid its recent engagement in Mali. France’s Algerian experiences of the 1990s were a prototype of terrorism later expanding to the wider EU/US – with attacks on the Metro, airliners and (foiled) the Eiffel Tower. The Algerian ‘Afghans’ returning to France in the early 1990s from their part in fighting the USSR launched their second Algerian war at home and in France – in parallel with the ’90s attacks by others on the US. The question now is what happens next in the Sahel – with Macron seeking re-election next year and post-coup Mali’s poll looking set to be bumped, to the glee of Russia and chagrin of the UN. Perhaps Mme Moutet can help on that side?

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Giles Chance
Giles Chance
3 years ago

France was in a very good position to know the truth about Saddam’s WMD programme – that the WMD’s did not exist. That’s why Chirac exercised a French veto at the UN Security Council against attacking Iraq – an important fact which the article omits to mention. A veto is meant to be just that. But Bush, aided by Blair, thought they knew better, and decided to ignore the veto. So much for a rules-based international order !
I usually appreciate Moutet’s articles about France, but this one, which attributed base reasons to France’s non-involvement in Iraq, showed too clearly the author’s underlying fundamental dislike of France.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Best to ask Mme Moutet about her love of France or not. Strikes me that she tailors her words, phrases and references for this audience, just as she could gear the same points to a French reader. The mark of an astute writer perhaps? Allez Moutet!

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Eh? She is French. Not supporting every single thing your government does doesn’t mean you dislike your country or are unpatriotic, except obviously in China.

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
3 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Given that Hans Blick and his ilk had spent several years searching for evidence of WMD, it makes you wonder why the French didn’t just say “nothing to see there, mate”

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

In which case, did the French share that intelligence or just decide to veto? I don’t remember any such argument being presented at the time. Was it also anything to do with the large amounts of money owed to them by Saddam that would have no chance of ever being repaid if he were deposed?

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
3 years ago

A major French newspaper (I can’t remember which) reported soon after 9/11 that the Pentagon explosion was caused by a lorry and not by an airliner flying at ground level with the precision that required a highly expert pilot.
The French were also owed money by Saddam Hussein, I believe, debts which evaporated with the invasion.