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If You’re Going to Get Crushed, Why Play?

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Heh. Maybe one of the reasons that the administration doesn’t like going to the UN is that they regularly get schooled by the French

First, during the first UN Resolution that was cobbled together, the French signed on to the U.S. language. While that first resolution favored Israeli interests disproportionately and did not call for an immediate Israeli military withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, it laid the groundwork for a ceasefire and for a deal on the Shebaa Farms.

The French encouraged the Arab League and Lebanon to object to the resolution — particularly over the failure to call for an immediate Israeli withdrawal. The French then jumped ship and sang in unity with Lebanon and the Arab League — and then pushed Hezbollah to accept something reasonable between the original US/French position and the later French/Arab League position.

In the end, the French maneuvered American agreement on the ceasefire and Israel’s troop withdrawals — and left Israel diplomatically cornered.

If John Bolton wants to take credit for any of this, let him — but it was the French all the way.

This reminds me of the run up to the legendary second resolution on the Iraq War, at which time the US first declared that it would bring about a vote in the expectation that France would be the lone dissenter, then declared that the vote would achieve a supermajority, then declared that it would achieve a majority, then declared that there would be no vote. What was particularly impressive about the French diplomacy was how well they were able to line up the developing world votes; reminding the African countries, for example, that France was still going to care about Africa (for good and ill) when the US had forgotten about the continent. Chirac has also done an impressive job of resurrecting French cred in the Islamic world, no small task for a country once bitterly reviled for its colonial brutality in Syria and Algeria.

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