France: It was with obvious satisfaction that leading French newspapers and television networks this week gave prominent coverage to a magazine that is virtually unknown outside the Washington Beltway, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
"The French Were Right," says the cover of the National Journal. In an in-depth, seven-page analysis, the magazine's correspondent, Paul Starobin, noted that President Jacques Chirac had "correctly predicted the consequences of invading Iraq".
Mr Chirac was right in saying that the threat posed by Saddam was not imminent, in warning President Bush "that democracy-building in Iraq was going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process" and in foreseeing that "the Muslim world would perceive a US-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United Nations as illegitimate - and thus would incite even greater anger towards America," Mr Starobin wrote.
In Washington DC, where the National Journal counts 12,000 subscribers in the White House, on Capitol Hill and among lobbyists and government agencies, there has not been a peep from the Bush administration. But the Journal has received a record number of requests for the issue, which is sold on only three newstands in Washington. It is to be discussed on the Sunday news talk shows tomorrow.
"The positive reaction to the story has overwhelmed any negative reaction," the Journal's editor, Charles Green, said in a telephone interview. Most of the attention, he admitted with a laugh, "seems to be concentrated in France", but readers in the US "have also contacted us to say how much they liked the story".
Staff at the French presidency are thrilled by the National Journal cover. "There were terrible moments," one official said. "We were insulted. The US administration poisoned everyone against us, with the complicity of a good portion of the US media. It was déguelasse (disgusting)."
The fact that the vindicating article was published by a US magazine clears the French of accusations of Schadenfreude, which the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defined as delight in the misfortune of others. The French are at pains not to cross the fine line between saying "We were right" and giving the impression they take pleasure from mounting casualty figures. "Unfortunately, every week our worst fears about Iraq come true," a French official said.
Mr Starobin recounts how Mr Chirac privately warned Mr Bush a year ago that the military campaign would go quickly, but the postwar phase would be extremely dangerous because of Arab nationalism and the pent-up violence of Iraqi society. A high-ranking French source confirmed the Journal's version of that meeting.
"If we have one piece of advice to give them now, it's to stop being an occupying power," the same source said. "To stop doing things alone, to work within a UN framework."
Mr Starobin credits the 1954-1962 Algerian war with giving Mr Chirac prescience about Iraq. "There is only one western country with an intimate, bloody and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is France," he wrote.
Past French work in counter-terrorism enabled Paris to make a more realistic assessment of the relative threats posed by al-Qaeda and Saddam, Mr Starobin wrote. And the French "had a clear reading of world, and in particular Muslim, public opinion . . ."
That this analysis appeared in a magazine routinely referred to in the US as "the influential National Journal" must be galling to the Bush administration.
A new pro-French caucus is becoming "one of the most chic clubs on Capitol Hill", Le Monde reported. The French Foreign Minister, Mr Dominique de Villepin, says France is "holding out a hand" to Washington. By announcing that it will speed up the transfer of power to a sovereign Iraqi government, the Bush administration has moved closer to the French position.
But the neoconservative clique, which a French official referred to as "the civilians in the Pentagon", still sees the French as troublemakers.