The French should be heard, not vilified

An argument between allies has been turned into a parody of the worst kind of dirty US primary campaign

It's better to be a "cheese-eating surrender monkey" than a "peanut-butter scoffing, gun-totin', thousand-pound gorilla".

That is the problem with insults. They immobilise rational argument; they force you to respond with insults. The buckets of foul invective poured over the French – "surrender monkeys", "wimps", "rats", "weasels" – in the American and British press in recent days are no longer a distraction from the problem of the Iraqi crisis. They are the problem.

The insults may have been carried to inventive heights by the American right-wing, but they began with the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his jibe against "old Europe". What could have been a political and diplomatic argument between allies – with some right on both sides – has been turned into a parody of the worst kind of dirty US primary campaign. Opponents are not just opposed, they are vilified; they are destroyed by association with straw villains (in France and Germany's case, anti-Semitism and Nazism).

This is not the sole reason why France will refuse to toe the American line in the UN security council next week – but it is one of the reasons. President Jacques Chirac seemed to many observers to be leaving his options open last week. No longer. It would now be politically suicidal for him to seem to bow to the will of the US – a country that, in the name of democracy, refuses to tolerate dissent among its friends.

The transatlantic alliance is threatened with collapse not because three countries (France, Germany and Belgium) refuse to go along with America's war planning. There have been more fundamental disagreements in Nato, such as De Gaulle's defection from the military wing in the 1960s. And yet this is clearly the most terrible row in Nato's history. The alliance is in danger because the temperature of the argument has been deliberately raised to a destructive level.

It did not have to be so. Just take a step back a moment.

The US believes that, after 12 years of procrastination, Saddam Hussein must be stripped of his weapons of mass destruction immediately, by armed intervention. Washington argues, with some reason, that United Nations weapons inspections have been tried and have failed, and that Iraq can never be trusted while Saddam is in power. France believes that Saddam should be disarmed but that there is no overriding case to justify a war that could kill thousands of innocent people and compound the terrorism-breeding hatred of the West in the Islamic world.

The majority of European Union and Nato governments agree with the United States. Does that put France out on some cynical, self-serving, cowardly, anti-Semitic, cheese-eating limb? Hardly.

The French viewpoint is shared by the vast majority of public opinion in all European countries, including Britain. It is endorsed by the majority on the UN Security Council. It is shared, almost word for word, by the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan. It is even accepted by 40 to 50 per cent of public opinion in the US itself. The French may be wrong. They may be right. The point is that they have a rational and valid argument, which deserves to be heard, not vilified.

Behind, the immediate arguments over Iraq, France has deeper concerns – about the US. It may be true that, as a judge of America, France is an unreliable witness, or at least a persistent critic. It may be that France has selfish reasons (as a permanent member of the Security Council) to wish to preserve the post-war consensus that the United Nations is the best guarantor of semi-civilised behaviour.

However, it is not the French alone who have been – or should be – alarmed by the "Dubya doctrine" of America's proper role in the world post-11 September. President Bush does not argue that might is right. He argues that America has overwhelming might and that it is always right, because it is America. If the UN Security Council is to survive at all, it must survive in the post 9/11 world, as a kind of international supreme soviet, whose duty is to endorse the American view. Ditto Nato.

You do not have to be an Americophobe (I lived in the US happily for five years; my son has an American passport) to find this approach scary. I believe that many people in America also find it scary. I believe that the British Government finds it just as scary as the French. The vicious moral absolutism of the attacks on friendly opponents proves how scary it is.

Tony Blair seems to believe that the best way to control the gun-totin' thousand-pound gorilla is to ride on its back. The French have tried coaxing and distracting the gorilla. Neither approach has worked. Nato lies in ruins. The UN may be next. And the war has not even started yet.

indyparis@compuservecom