Watch what France does, not what it says.

Watch what Jacques Chirac does, not what he says. Meeting Tony Blair for an awkward mini-summit in Le Touquet today after months of Anglo-French skirmishing, the French president continues to bask in his star role as Europe's "conscience" and leader of restraint.



His public posture is to resist the slide towards an "unjustifiable" war that is opposed by the citizens of every European state.

But early today a French armada including an aircraft carrier, nuclear submarine and other warships slipped out of Toulon and headed for the eastern Mediterranean.

France's defence minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, said the mission was a routine training exercise, but added: "French military forces will be ready to intervene in Iraq, should the decision be taken."



Here's one opinion about what France is up to (from the same article):

Geoffrey Van Orden, a Tory MEP and vice-chairman of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee, predicted that M Chirac would come off the fence once he had guaranteed France's share of the post-reconstruction and oil contracts in Iraq and, more important, once he had exploited the acute vulnerability of Tony Blair, who is struggling to prevent his loyalty to America from shattering his European policy.

Here's another view of France from the National Post: France is no Eurowimp

The trouble is the cheese-eating surrender paradigm is insufficient. If you want to go monkey fishing, there's certainly no shortage of Eurowimps: Since the unpleasantness of 60 years ago, the Germans have become as aggressively and obnoxiously pacifist as they once were militarist; they loathe their own armed forces, never mind anybody else's. But France is one of only five official nuclear powers in the world, a status it takes seriously. When Greenpeace were interfering with French nuclear tests in the Pacific, they blew up the damn boat. Even I, a right-wing detester of the eco-loonies, would balk at killing the buggers.



A few weeks ago, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. Don't ask me what's going on: President Wossname represents the southern Wotchamacallit tribe and they're unpopular with natives in the northern province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know, French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d'Orsay but nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7.3 (d) of Hans Blix's hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don't care what you think about it.