DEAD AMERICANS 

By RALPH PETERS 
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March 12, 2003 -- THE government of France is fighting an undeclared war with the United States. The result will be the needless deaths of American soldiers in the Gulf. And the more Americans Saddam manages to kill, the greater President Chirac's satisfaction will be. The French pride themselves on their rationality. But the rabid anti-Americanism that has gripped the Parisian elite is a form of collective madness, spawned by jealousy, wounded pride and astonishing delusions about French power. To embarrass America, the French government is willing to destroy no end of international organizations and alliances. The real cowboys in this conflict are galloping along the banks of the Seine. 

In the end, the greatest loser will be France, since French power is as crumbly as Roquefort cheese. Paris isn't a "third force," but a third farce. French behavior in the current crisis is obsessive, not reasoned and ultimately self-defeating. 

In the short term, though, the bill-payers for the Gallic tantrum will be the additional American soldiers - as well as Iraqi soldiers and civilians - who will die because Paris has encouraged Saddam to believe the international community, led by France, will protect him even after a war begins. 

Thanks to Jacques Chirac, Saddam Hussein and his generals now see hope where there is none. At least some of those who would have surrendered readily will now fight. Saddam will pull every possible trick to excite world opinion against the United States, including staged atrocities. And our troops will have to kill men who otherwise would have surrendered. Some of our own fighting men and women will die in the process, all because France has led the Iraqi regime down the garden path. 

Of course, France will abandon Saddam in the end. But we must make no mistake about French culpability for the ultimate casualty figures. This is not a mere diplomatic tiff. At the highest levels of government, the French know what they are doing, at least tactically (their strategy is a dangerous, pathetic muddle). We cannot allow a French betrayal in so important a matter to go unpunished. If there are no consequences for French complicity in the deaths of young Americans, there will be no future for American diplomacy in Europe. 

Too smart for their own good, the French have upset Carl von Clausewitz's old dictum that "War is a simple continuation of politics by other means." For Chirac and for Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, international politics is now a form of war. And their war is not against terrorism, or tyrants, or injustice. Their war is against the United States of America. 

The French would love to prevent the war in the Gulf, thus setting themselves up as the champions of tyrants everywhere and of Arab tyrants in particular. But Paris realizes there is really very little chance of deflecting Washington. So their essential goal is to complicate matters, to vilify America and to make the United States pay the highest possible price for any success it achieves, while remaining ready to capitalize on any American failures. 

When the war in Iraq ends with a decisive American victory, Chirac will put on his little C'est la vie smile and insist that our differences were nothing but a disagreement between old friends, something one must expect in our complex world. Meanwhile, he and his closest advisers yearn for a bloody American defeat. 

Nothing would please Chirac more than thousands of dead American soldiers inside the borders of Iraq, with Saddam alive and defiant. If this war goes badly, Chirac could have more American blood on his hands than does Osama bin Laden. 

Consider the practical effects of French cheerleading for Saddam: 

* Saddam should feel hopeless by now; instead, he has been led to believe that, even if war cannot be averted, he has a real chance of defeating the United States diplomatically by fighting our troops to a bloody stalemate. He believes - thanks to the French - that the more blood he sheds, the likelier he and his regime are to survive. 

* Saddam will be even more inclined to employ weapons of mass destruction on as wide a scale as possible, certain that France and his other supporters will excuse his behavior as an inevitable response to American aggression, not proof that he possessed such weapons all along. 

* The war is delayed, day after day, giving Saddam ever more time to strengthen his defenses, while American troops sit in the desert, watching Saddam wire his oilfields with explosives, dig in his troops and prepare a massive defense of Baghdad. Our troops are ready now, and each delay only weakens our readiness compared to that of our adversary. 

* The French support for Saddam encourages terrorists, Iraqi-sponsored or otherwise, to believe that wartime actions against the United States could have a decisive effect, given the opposition to American policy even among Washington's traditional "friends." 

The last point is easy to undervalue. Terrorists - and Saddam himself - do not live in our world of abundant, competitive information. Rather, they live in worlds of enthusiastic self-delusion and megalomania. The ruthless French defense of Saddam - an unspeakable dictator - has played into the fantasies of tyrant and terrorist alike, convincing them that they are stronger than they really are, that they are not alone, and that it is America which is evil and vulnerable. 

Readers may note that I have not even raised the issue of recent reports that French firms continued to help Iraq improve its armaments into the early weeks of this year. Although one of the many reasons the French do not want us in Baghdad is that they don't want us going through Iraqi archives and uncovering the extent of their complicity in Saddam's defiance of sanctions, the material aid French firms may have provided to Iraq is a trivial issue compared to the moral and diplomatic encouragement Paris has given Baghdad. 

Ultimately, this grotesque resurgence of French "diplomacy" will fail. France is weak, ill-defended and hated in Africa and much of the Middle East with a quiet hatred that goes far deeper than the topical anti-Americanism so much in evidence. Nor will its attempts to glorify itself at America's expense provide France with any security. The terrorists will not reward France for its pandering; on the contrary, I expect we shall see a major terrorist strike in France this year. The French do not merely live in a bad neighborhood - the bad neighborhoods live within France. The French are bribing their executioners in the expectation of mercy. 

We may hope - and pray - that the war against Iraq will be swift, with low casualties. But every American who dies in this war will have a French diplomatic bullet in his or her body. 

Ralph Peters has canceled his orders for 2000 Bordeaux. And he will cancel his support for the Bush administration if it does not punish France for its betrayal. 

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