EUROPE SUDDENLY TAKES INTEREST IN IRAQ

Call me suspicious, but I'm wondering what's going on here. The French are galloping into the fray in Iraq! Could it be a revival of the French spirit? The big news in Iraq at the moment is the visit of French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, with the Daily Telegraph quoting an unnamed Iraqi official, who

said that Mr Kouchner was the "most important VIP" to arrive in the Iraqi capital this year, outranking earlier trips by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, as well as Dick Cheney, the US vice-president.

Despite the fact that I differ wildly with the Iraqi official's opinion, it doesn't detract from the significance of this visit. Kouchner was never averse to swimming against the anti-American tide by calling Saddam a bloodthirsty tyrant and actually acknowledging that France needs to make changes to foreign policy (how very unFrench of him) but perhaps he knew the trends more than his brittle predecessors did. His credentials for this mission are certainly impeccable.
The blogosphere has taken the visit quite seriously as well, see here, here and here.

Nidra Poller publishes a round-up of the stunned French reaction to the visit that had clearly been planned in some secrecy. Among other articles Libération reminds us that:

Kouchner was a personal friend of UN official Sergio Viera de Mello, killed in the August 2003 attack against the UN compound, along with Nadia Younes, Fiona Watson, and Jean-Sélim Kanan, who had worked with him in Kosovo. Kouchner, former Socialist Health Minister and one of the founders of Doctors without Borders, defends the “droit d’ingérence,” defined as the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation in order to protect its inhabitants. He disagreed with France’s head-on opposition to the U.S. in 2003, and believes that if France had remained by the side of its American ally, war could have been avoided.

Now before we get all excited, I wonder if now that America, the U.K. and Australia have done all the dirty work, sacrificed our blood and our treasure, it's time for the E.U. to send its first emissary to stake a claim in the newly sanitized nation in the region. Though it's not Sarkozy himself, it's his foreign minister and it must be remembered that Sarkozy would have sent him and Sarkozy has proven himself to be nothing if not an E.U. man to the core.

SOURCE

Cross-posted here