The French government is being blackmailed by a terrorist group, according to news reports - and it was apparently in the process of complying when the story was leaked.

To recap: prior to the current debacle, everyone agreed Iraq was clearly in violation of the original peace terms, and agreed that Hussein's government was corrupt and violating human rights on a massive scale. There were also sufficient insinuations between the government and known terrorist organizations to sustain at a decision by UN to send in an international force to search for the WMDs and clean up the government. Any action through the UN and not the US would have both granted the action the air of international legitimacy that the US invasion ultimately lacked, and monitored/tempered any proposals by the US that appeared to overstepthe bounds of enforcing the peace agreement.

The French appeared determined not to approve any such move. They spearheaded the movement, along with the German government, to block efforts made by the US to work with the UN. Bush, in turn, was determined to act with or without the sanction of the UN, and ultimately to forego an air of international legitimacy in order to do so. It all depends on point of view: were the French digging in their heels in deciding not to invade, or the US digging in its heels in deciding to do so?

I've analogized the argument about whether to invade Iraq to a probation revocation hearing. A revocation is to impose the original "sentence" if the terms aren't upheld in any meaningful manner. Sometimes, a judge will want evidence of a new crime in order to revoke the probation and impose the original sentence. The judge will feel that anything less - failure to pay fines, failure to check in, failure of a drug test - is somehow not sufficiently "bad" to impose the original sentence. But the prosecutor argues that if the defendant commits a new crime, we don't need to revoke - the state can send them to jail on the new crime instead - the bar is being set too high. So it seemed with the French. There was ample evidence in favor of action to enforce the peace agreement. It appeared to me that the French were being quite intransigent in their position against taking any actions other than further inspections with unlimited time and no teeth behind them. At the time, I thought it was simply to rein in the US, which they saw as a threat due to the level of power and influence it has as one of the few remaining "superpowers." If this proves true, I'm not so sure.

It's a complex situation, and neither side is right, as far as I can see. But if one side is open to influence from the same terrorist groups we're trying to neutralize, there's a bigger problem than I realized.

UPDATE: I changed the link on 3/26/04 to a cached version, since the original website no longer had the story available.