(4 of 5)
Some conversations must have been delicious, but none more so than the polite phone call made by Vice President Dick Cheney, once a bitter opponent of Marxist liberation movements in Africa, to the Soviet-educated, former communist President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola. Generally, the Administration got a good reception. "We're realistic enough to be on the side of the 800-lb. gorilla rather than between the gorilla and Iraq," confessed a senior diplomat from one Council member nation. China and Russia, both with veto power in the Council, said Powell's speech had changed little, but neither is thought likely to nix a new resolution. "Russia," said a Foreign Ministry official in Moscow, "isn't going to mess up its relationship with the U.S. because of Iraq." China, say Security Council diplomats, is playing a curiously docile role, but few think it will stand in the way of the U.S. "If Powell can convince the other countries that war is necessary," says Chu Shulong, director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University, "China will go along with them. Beijing is pleased by improvements in relations between the two countries and reluctant to do anything that would jeopardize them."
That leaves--fanfare, please--the French. Their role throughout the Iraq crisis has baffled and frequently infuriated observers. In the fall, when French diplomats were crucial to the drafting of Security Council Resolution 1441, President Jacques Chirac cleverly positioned himself close to the Bush Administration while maintaining a degree of independence. But in the past few weeks, the French line against a war has hardened, and on Jan. 20, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went out of his way, without warning Powell, to oppose a rush to war in a public ambush at the U.N.
Powell was furious, but the French claimed they were motivated by high principle. "For us," said an official at the presidential Elysee Palace, "the key question is whether the threat from Iraq is of such a nature and amplitude as to justify a war. Our government and most of European public opinion don't think so." On its face, that suggests France would veto a resolution authorizing war--something it has not done since the Suez crisis in 1956. But to do so would invite the U.S. to go to war without U.N. sanction, as Bush has said he would, and would effectively wreck the Security Council, along with France's pretensions of being a great power.
Hence the French dilemma. "If they veto," says a U.N. diplomat, "that's a permanent slap at the U.S.'s face--very dangerous--and they threaten to make the Security Council irrelevant. If France abstains, it's not a player. If it votes yes, Chirac looks like a weather vane." Small wonder that, according to several sources, French Foreign Minister de Villepin was openly agitated--"shrill," said one observer--at the meetings in New York last week. ("All you talk about is war. That's all you want to talk about," de Villepin said to Powell at a lunch after his speech.) But if Blix returns from Baghdad with a report damning Saddam, he will give the French a ladder to humbly climb down, the U.S. will have its resolution, and Saddam will have a few days to figure out whether to save his hide in exile or face the might of American armed forces.