COALITION OF THE UNWILLING
Charles Krauthammer has another good piece on France’s motives:
The usual reasons apply — France’s enormous Iraqi oil contracts and enormous unpaid Iraqi loans that would vanish with Saddam Hussein. But they don’t suffice to explain such an ambitious enterprise. There is another reason, far more powerful. The Iraq crisis, and the roiling uneasiness in the world about U.S. policy, have provided France with an opportunity for the ultimate grand stroke — an attempt to actually break the American monopoly of power in the world. This is geopolitics at the highest level, and the French, who have been banished from the game for a good half-century, cannot resist the lure of playing it again.
So far, they appear to be losing.
