France's Neocon

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has just from three days in Iraq during which he pledged "under President Sarkozy, France would no longer sit on the sidelines saying 'we told you so'." The trip was the first visit to Iraq by a French envoy since the 2003 American invasion.

This shift in French policy comes as no surprise to people familiar with Kouchner's past. The founder of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), he was not only one of the only French politicians to support the "principle" of ousting of Saddam, but was also a key character in Paul Berman's "Power and the Idealists," which traced the political development of the 1968 radicals from rabble-rousing anti-fascist activists, to third way moderates and liberal interventionists.

Here's Berman, beginning responding to excerpts from Kouchner's book, "The Warriors of Peace":

"'Intervention — the word was frightening, it seemed synonymous with rape. But nothing is more consensual, so long as intervention always responds to a cry for help.' Rape, consensualness — these were preposterous words. Still, it was clear enough what Kouchner meant to say. He wanted to be a Résistant, not a collabo — even if resisting meant shoving international law aside for a moment, and pushing his way into some other country. That was his reasoning, and he gave this reasoning a label, and the label was generational. 'Our generation wanted to react,' he said. In this one passage Kouchner defined the moral logic of the people with backgrounds like his own; the logic of the people who had gone into the streets in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and had fought their battles, sometimes foolishly; the logic of people who may even have deluded themselves for a while with fantasies about Che Guevara or the PLO or some other guerrilla mania, and yet righted themselves, eventually; the logic of people who had come to realize that intervention in the Balkan War of the 1990s was the fulfillment of their own ideals...and was not an act of imperialism. This one little passage of Kouchner’s was a sort of generational manifesto."

Sarkozy, by picking Kouchner as his Foreign Minister, was sending a tacit signal of sympathyfor the ideological underpinnings of the "lefty hawk" case for war.

Kouchner's overtures, though, are already receiving major pushback from France's diplomatic elite. One diplomat told the International Herald Tribune: "The prevailing view in a significant part of the French diplomatic community is that mediation in Iraq is futile and that the civil war needs to run its course and hand a decisive victory to one faction before the violence can end."

Slimy, cynical, and probably true. Apparently, though, Kouchner is an old Iraq hand and has some cachet with the various factions, having "longstanding and close relations with Kurdish and Shiite leaders" and a personal relationship with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani giong back three decades. This, at least according to the IHT, puts him in a unique position to negotiate some type of agreement between the parties. It's unclear, however, how much power these aging leaders have over the roving militias whose youthful leadership has few connections or allegiances to the old powers of Europe.

UPDATE: Another motivation:

"Kouchner's trip...renewed interest in reports that the French oil company Total may seek a stake in Iraqi oil fields...But Kouchner's office said that no executives had accompanied Kouchner to Iraq and that economic interests were not the focus of the trip."