Trent has extended his argument; I’m interspersing some comments below, and will reply with a longer post in the next day or so; I have an appointment with a William Hill Cabernet…

Please compare this from Collin May:

Now to France.
…
My point is that Jacques Chirac cast himself as the defender of Republican values, but Republican values have never found an exact fit with the French nation. Indeed, these values are now often diverging from the French nation itself and seeking something of a new home, a home that could be the new Europe. In other words, the French nation is splitting from the universal values it was supposed to incarnate, a split that began more or less with the end of its empire and the colonial wars following World War II. This is the great difference between events of September 11 and those of April 21. The attack on Republican values came from inside France, from people claiming to defend the French nation, whereas the US was attacked by a foreign intruder.

The implication is that the United States retains its national integrity in the face of foreign attack, while France is losing, even actively terminating, its national existence in favor of the European Union. French patriotism is committing suicide, while American patriotism is flowering.

AL: Yes, France is trying hard to leverage it’s national power by tying Europe together into a bureaucratic suprastate – which France believes it will effectively control. Part of where our views diverge on this is that you seem to be saying that Republican (in the classical, rather than GOP sense) nationalism is key to the ‘moral foundation’ of French national politics. I don’t see that as the case, because unlike us in the U.S., the French see themselves as a true ‘people’. Their national standing is relatively independent of the political structure they live under…they would be a nation regardless, bound by language, tradition, and culture.

[Check out Vinod Valopillil’s take on this (via Instapundit)]
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N.B for the complete, updated history of this discussion arranged by date, see “Fight Night: The Dance In France“)
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Yet the Chirac government still behaves as though the only thing that matters is preventing Saddam from being overthrown by the Americans.

If it isn’t money that is motivating the French government and it isn’t power in the EU, then what is it driving them to oppose the USA on Iraq?

The answer isn’t physical, it is existential.

French elites abandoned religion for nationalism after the French revolution. Then they abandoned nationalism for multi-cultural, EU style, transnational progressivism. Now that has failed as well and they are as lost as the Wahhabbis in the modern world. The elites that govern France are using their power to hurt and cause pain.

AL: Sorry, but while the EU certainly has it’s problems (and I’ll argue is doomed for a variety of reasons and a Bad Thing for others) it is a bit of a reach to claim that it has failed. It is clearly a crisis point, in which either the new constitution will be adopted … or not, and the risk of dissolution is (fortunately) high. But the french elites (along with the German, Belgian, Dutch, and British elites) remain firmly committed to a supranational entity.

As I said before and restate now:

“People who have chosen the path of damnation are easily known. They seek power above all things. They choose what will immediately benefit them over choices that take longer but reward more. And they use what power they have to hurt others, because inflicting pain is the only pleasure they have that will reach past the aching wound where their soul used to be.

AL: Trent, here’s where I just scratch my head in confusion. How do you get from A to B? From the attempts by the French cadres d’administration to solidify their power to their taking on pain and evil as their and political objectives? I’m just baffled; help me out here.

The France has had a “value neutral” foreign policy since before it was a real nation. This has even extended to modern times and includes issues of nuclear proliferation. Here is a link from the National Review and a snip from the Moscow Times (with a hat tip to The Diffident Spectator) :

In April 1975, Hussein visited Moscow to ask for Soviet help to build a full reactor to make nuclear weapons. Although Russia agreed to supply Iraq with staggering amounts of conventional weapons, it balked at helping Baghdad go nuclear. In September 1975, Hussein went to Paris to meet politicians with far fewer scruples than Soviet Communists. The French prime minister at the time, Jacques Chirac, signed an agreement to sell Hussein a reactor and arms-grade uranium.

If Chirac and other French politicians had had their way, Hussein could have made tens of nuclear bombs by 1990. The war to liberate Kuwait would never have taken place or would have turned into an all-out nuclear confrontation between Iraq, Israel and the United States. The tragedy was avoided when in 1979 Israeli agents near Toulon destroyed two French-built reactors en route to Iraq. In 1981, the Israelis bombed to debris the French replacement reactor in Iraq before it could be made operational.

Maybe France and Germany are so loyally trying to save Hussein because they want to cover up their long-time cooperation in helping to build weapons of mass destruction? Is the treachery of the past feeding more treachery today?

AL: Go read the history of the French ‘Force de Frappe’, and the effort they (and the U.K.) put into having an independent nuclear deterrent. They believe that this is a good thing because it restrains the superpowers, whose allies they did not feel themselves to be. Again, not ‘evil treachery’ because they never gave us fealty to breach.

America during the majority of the Cold War was no different than France in its foreign policy. There were many dictators who were supported by the USA while they muttered the magic words “I’m an anti-Communist.” The Nixon-Ford years, where Henry Kissinger reigned supreme in foreign policy, was the high point of a “valueless national interest” foreign policy over a “morality informed” foreign policy.

The American public and many American elites rejected this approach. First Jimmy Carter, with his concern for human rights, and Ronald Reagan, with his “Evil Empire” speech defining the Soviet Union, returned a moral dimension to American foreign policy for 12 years.

Now both these leaders made grave moral errors that helped to set up the Islamofascist WMD threat we face today, for all their “moral posturing.” Jimmy Carter did not respond forcefully to the hostage taking of the American embassy in Iran. While Reagan did both the “bug-out boogie” from Beirut after the bombing there and looked the other way while Pakistan got the nuclear bomb.

AL: I’m starting to get your point, but think you’re mistaken on the facts. Reagan defined his moral compass by their alignment for or against the USSR; hence our support of the mujads in Afghanistan. Carter, with his politically-correct emphasis on ‘human rights as long as they don’t really damage our interests’ was arguably one of the worst Presidents as far as foreign policy that we’ve seen. Iran would stand as an excellent example of his masterful handing of the difficult dismount that one must do when trying to move from a repressive dictatorship to a less-repressive dictatorship. BTW, I’ll point out that it is truism (I need to do some homework and try and validate this) that most revolutions happen when repression is eased.

Yet the return of “valueless national interest” after Reagan arguably made things worse. Just look at G.H.W. Bush with his post-Gulf War deference to Saudi and Gulf State interests in keeping Iraq intact and the work his people did to keep a Serb dominated Yugoslavia intact to preserve “stability.” You also have Clinton’s serial mistakes with the Mogadishu “”Bug-out,” the post-African Embassy attack cruise missile bombing of Ossama plus an aspirin factory as well as the non-reaction to the USS Cole attack coming from that same narrow view of national interest that treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue apart from middle eastern foreign policy.

The bottom line is the valueless indulgence of national interest with Arab oil states lead directly to 9/11/2001 attack. In so many words, a valueless pursuit of national interest enables evil. This is why all the people around Dubya, as William Kristol put it, are Reaganites now. As he said in a column:

As President Bush said in his State of the Union address, “America’s purpose is more than to follow a process–it is to achieve a result.” The result the president had in mind was “the end of terrible threats to the civilized world.” Reagan ended one such threat, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now, as the president explained, we face a different kind of threat–“a world of chaos and constant alarm,” where “outlaw regimes” sponsor terrorism and acquire and trade in horrific weapons, the better to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The nature of the regime is crucial, rather than some alleged underlying, geographically or economically or culturally determined “national interest.” The priority of the political order implies a morally informed American foreign policy. Thus, a brutal tyranny like Saddam’s is evil, Bush said, or else “evil has no meaning”–and Bush intends to liberate the people of Iraq from their regime. As President Bush said to the people of Iraq, “Your enemy is not surrounding your country–your enemy is ruling your country.”

Now, it is true that regimes don’t exist apart from the various material interests and geographical and historical characteristics of nations. So “morality in foreign policy” is always limited. Necessity has its claims. And the freedom and security of one’s own nation come first. But our freedom and security turn out to be inextricably linked to the character of regimes elsewhere in the world.

It mattered that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” It matters that North Korea has, as the president said, an “oppressive regime ruling] a people living in fear and starvation.”

AL: ‘Political order’ means many things. On one hand, we can emphasize the ‘political’ and talk about liberty and due process; on the other we can talk about ‘order’ and emphasize the rule of power. I think we face a difficult but not impossible task; it will require that we recognize that our interests are not everyone’s, and allow for legitimate conflicts. Our history has been informed by an idealistic attachment to our values, except when our interests are challenged. I’m not an “All Americal Foreign Policy is Evil” fella, but neither do I look at our history in Latin America, Asia (not just Vietnam) or Africa as ‘enlightened by high moral purpose’.

I have said before that the French are acting as if the fall of Iraq would be a regime changing event. Steve Den Beste has speculated that it was for reasons of WMD proliferation. I don’t think so anymore.

There is a mortal threat to the French regime, but it isn’t from American hard power or anything in the Iraqi archives America will capture. It is from the soft power of American example, not from a “moral foreign policy,” but the example success from the rotation of political elites within a Nation-State. That is a mortal threat to France and the EU transnational progressives alike.

The whole point of the EU is to isolate the political elites from the will of the democratic, nationalist, masses. The success of America points out that the EU experiment’s isolation and inbreeding of Euro-elites is what is destroying Europe as a viable alternative to the American model.

AL: Again, I think you’re right re:the superiority of the American model, but flat wrong when you suggest that the EU elites think they are doomed by it. They think they are powerful enough to stand up to it, hence the situation we’re in right now.

As it is with the Islamofascist, so it is with French elites, the existence of America is a grave threat to their identity that must be destroyed for them to live.

AL: Wild hyperbole. The EU simply insists on parity with the US; a party engendered by our willingness to bear the burden of defense costs for the Western world.

This brings us back to the French pursuit of “valueless national interest.” Lexington Green ran the following thought experiment (which his fellow contributors disagreed with here and here) on the assumption that Steven Den Beste was right about the French WMD connection to Iraq:

Let us take it a step farther. Let’s assume that the French and Germans have been actively assisting Iraq to acquire WMD, especially nuclear weapons. Why would they do this? First, of course, money. That has to be part of it. In the German case, I think it is probably the main part. But they are running huge risks just for money. There must be more. What?

At least in the case of the French, a plausible explanation would be a positive desire to see Iraq armed with WMD, and to assist it to acquire them. Why? Pure power politics. France sees itself in a zero-sum power struggle with America. But America is the Hyperpower. France is forced to dance to Washington’s tune. So, France is a non-status quo power, which wants to terminate American Unipolarity. But it cannot do so on its own. It simply lacks the size, economic power, military power, vitality, efficiency – everything which it would need for a direct challenge to the United States. There is no way for France to get into the same league as the United States. France has tried to build a European Union which would offset U.S. power, with itself as primus inter pares, but it is clear to everyone with half a brain that this project will never be a true challenger to the United States.

That leaves to France only the option of doing of things which positively harm the position of the United States. France cannot do this overtly, because the United States can crush French militarily if it came to it. Therefore, arming Saddam is a way to covertly harm the United States to the advantage of France. The French benefit from nuclear weapons proliferating, because this has the effect of neutralizing American conventional military power. The French benefit from Saddam becoming an unassailable regional power in the Persian Gulf, as a client and covert ally of France, because this makes them a major player in the region through their ties to Saddam, and damages American interests in the region. The French might even believe that they would benefit from the provision of nuclear weapons to terrorists, so long as they were used against the United States. A nuclear detonation in New York or Washington or Chicago or all three would severely damage the United States. Destruction on this scale would cause worldwide economic disruption. But it would also render the United States a much less formidable actor, far less able to make its influence felt abroad, since it would be absorbed with police activity and reconstruction at home. This would enhance the relative power of other states at the expense of the United States, including France. Complicity in the destruction of millions of American lives is a price the senior political leadership in France would probably be willing to pay to enhance France’s political position in the world, if it could get away with it, and if its own consequent economic losses were not unendurably severe.

So there you have it, whether you argue from valueless interest or existential evil, the result is the same. The French are hiding something they did with Iraq. The most likely explanation is they provided working nukes to Iraq.

AL: More wild hyperbole. Yes, the French want to harm US interests in order to advance their own. Yes, the French are less anxious about a multilateral nuclear standoff than we are; that’s a world in which they believe they can navigate very successfully, because their approach to foreign policy is so instrumental. But there’s a large gap from ‘turning a blind eye’ to delivering working nukes.

We will find out is this theory is true if Saddam uses one on advancing American troops before he goes down.

Or if Saddam has already smuggled one to Syria for Hezbolla to use in nuking Israel.

AL: If he had one, it’d have been used already. I doubt that a week will go by from the time he successfully builds one to either a public demonstration or an actual attack. What in his history suggests that he waits to exploit any advantage he may have? He acts in the moment, and has every time.

Trent, to me there’s a mixture of sensible and difficult to understand here; yes, France (along with Germany and Russia and several other states) is acting actively against our interests, but what’s new about that? Yes, they have a different model, one that aims for a supranational bureaucracy welding together what were once states into something they believe they can dominate, or at minimum be an equal within. They don’t have a problem with a constellation of nuclear-armed states holding each other hostage – to them that’ preferable to being dependent on one nuclear-armed state.

They have a very different vision of what the world ought to be. We ought to offer alternative visions, and use every tool we have (up to and including military force) to see that our vision wins out.

There’s a problem, though.

We’re a small minority of the people on the planet. We need to win converts faster than we make enemies, or we’ll eventually be faced with the decision to lose or to commit genocide.

A clear moral vision and a willingness to work within it is a part of what it will take to win converts to our side. But it’s going to have to be a flexible and inclusive vision, and I wonder, I really do, if the conservative Christian leadership who is in large part in control of the centers of power under GWB really have the ability to be flexible and inclusive.

It’s gonna be interesting…