Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

What was going through the minds of the Rive Gauche crowd yesterday afternoon as they sat in the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and stared at the person on the podium before them? Did they see a US Secretary of State radiating the enormous confidence that comes with the kind of power France no longer possesses? Or did they see a US Secretary of State who is the living proof of a society that now enables its once-oppressed minorities to become part of the ruling elite? Or did they see a US Secretary of State who is a woman both extraordinarily elegant and sophisticated?

Regardless of what they thought, we can assume that many of them left the room far deeper in the grip of the gloom that currently envelops France. It's bad enough being a country that seems to have lost its way in the world, but it's even worse being one where even the old certainties no longer hold true. Remember those? Americans should admire French fashion and esteem French culture, but the French should be allowed to retain their right to mock American fashion and despise American culture, and consider themselves a vastly superior civilization while doing so.

This hypocritical state of affairs might have continued for generations to come for all we know, but the French made a fatal move two years ago and things have changed as a result — changed utterly. It is one thing to ridicule, to hate, to oppose the US, but it's a very different matter to set about building a coalition to inflict damage upon it. And that's what Jacques Chirac did. With US troops massed on the border of Iraq and ready to remove its despot, George Bush, at the behest of Tony Blair, spent four months trying to cobble together a UN resolution that would have pleased Paris and its partners Berlin and Moscow. But all to no avail. In that wasted time, Saddam was busy planning the guerrilla campaign of murder that has since led to the deaths of thousands of Iraqis (21 more yesterday) and more than 1,000 Americans. A very costly lesson has been learned in Washington and it won't be forgotten for a long, long time. For those ordinary Americans whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought to free France in the 20th century, all M. Chirac's horses and all M. Chirac's men will never be able to put it back together again.

Best bit from the speech? There were many highlights, but this is hard to beat for the amount of history it compresses into a few sentences:

"In my own experience, a black woman named Rosa Parks was just tired one day of being told to sit in the back of a bus, so she refused to move. And she touched off a revolution of freedom across the American South. In Poland, Lech Walesa had had enough of the lies and the exploitation, so he climbed a wall and he joined a strike for his rights; and Poland was transformed. In Afghanistan just a few months ago, men and women, once oppressed by the Taliban, walked miles, forded streams and stood hours in the snow just to cast a ballot for their first vote as a free people. And just a few days ago in Iraq, millions of Iraqi men and women defied the terrorist threats and delivered a clarion call for freedom. Individual Iraqis risked their lives. One policeman threw his body on a suicide bomber to preserve the right of his fellow citizens to vote. They cast their free votes, and they began their nation's new history. These examples demonstrate a basic truth — the truth that human dignity is embodied in the free choice of individuals."

Excellent, too, was the reply to the questioner who asked: "Is there one single Arab country; is there one single Arab country in the world, which really deserves to be defended by the President Bush?" Secretary Rice:

"Let's talk about the Arab people. The Arab people deserve a better future than is currently in front of them. This is a part of the world in which the status quo is not going to be acceptable. You have large populations that are not receiving proper education. As the report to the United Nations by Arab intellectuals noted, you have 22 countries that have a GDP that is not the size of Spain. This is just not acceptable for a culture — the Arab cultures — that were, in many ways, part of the cradle of civilization. How can this be? And so the freedom deficit, the absence of freedom, has had very dramatic, negative effects in this part of the world. And unfortunately, we in the West, for too long, turned a blind eye to that freedom deficit. When the President spoke at Whitehall in London, he talked about 60 years of trying to buy stability at the expense of freedom, and getting neither. And what we have gotten instead, is a level of hopelessness that has produced an ideology of hatred so virulent, so thorough, that people flew airplanes into American buildings on a fine September morning; blew up a train station in Madrid; people in another part of the world from another tradition, but the same ideology of hatred, that took helpless children hostage in Russia. This can't be the future of the Middle East."

Don't know what Senor Zapatero will make of the mention of Spain, there. Doubt if we'll be hearing much from him on trans-Atlantic policy for the next four years, though. Condoleezza Rice means business.