A Frenchman I Can Admire
Friday, September 28th, 2007That’s the best way for me to talk about French President Nicholas Sarkozy after his speech to the UN General Assembly. Based on his column, it’s apparent that that’s Charles Krauthammer’s opinion, too:
On the largest possible stage, the U.N. General Assembly, President Nicolas Sarkozy put Iran on notice. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had said that France could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Sarkozy said that France cannot. He declared Iran’s nuclear ambitions “an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world.”
His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had earlier said that the world faces two choices, successful diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program or war. And Sarkozy himself has no great hopes for the Security Council, where China and Russia are blocking any effective action against Iran. He does hope to get the European Union to join the U.S. in imposing serious sanctions.
“Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace,” he warned. “They lead to war.” This warning about appeasement was intended particularly for Germany, which for commercial reasons has been resisting U.S. pressure to support effective sanctions.
Any French president with the courage to state that policy with that conviction is someone I can deal with. In fact, I wish there were more like-minded Western European leaders in the Sarkozy mold. Sarkozy’s statements have put Democrats in a bit of a box, though. For months (years really), we’ve heard about how ‘The World’ hates us because of President Bush’s reckless policies. That paradigm is losing credibility because leaders like President Sarkozy are embracing President Bush’s policies.
That’s the reason why the landscape in Washington has shifted so dramatically:
Just this week, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for very strong sanctions on Iran and urging the administration to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist entity. A similar measure passed the Senate Wednesday by 76-22, declaring that it is “a critical national interest of the United States” to prevent Iran from using Shiite militias inside Iraq to subvert the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.
A few months ago, the question was: Will the Democratic Congress force a withdrawal from Iraq? Today the question in Congress is: What can be done to achieve success in Iraq, most specifically, by countering Iran, which is intent on seeing us fail? (more…)