Comments on: Le Club De Paris

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 07:44:04 +0000

I obsessively reload all the stories I post, particularly the ones without many comments … Reasonable as the approach may be, you have to admit that Chirac probably takes some measure of joy in this type of eminently reasonable, completely defensible foot-dragging Absolutely agree with you. I didn’t trust Chirac before it was cool (I’ve always regarded him as a Gaullist and a crook) and don’t trust him now. The fact that he did so many right things in the lead-up to war is probably just evidence for the stopped clock theorem. Heard on the news this morning that Baker had announced a forgiveness deal from Russia; interested to see if this is real or not …

By: st

st — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:13:47 +0000

Probably too late, and probably nobody reading this response, but what the hell. dsquared: absolutely not! In fact, I can’t think of a better forum for this kind of a deal. Hell, the club exists for a set of really good reasons, all of which the US ascribes to (at least they do when the political fate of the US president is not tied to the credible rehabilitation of the debtor government). Hell, if the US had any faith in their own little Iraqi science project, they would take the Club standards as a challenge and say “Great! This is exactly the type of credible objective standard that we need to measure progress in Iraq, instead of all this carping from the domestic political opposition.” They won’t do this, of course, because they have no faith in their ability to meet the metric. I am just noting a corollary political benefit for the specific creditor nations at issue. Reasonable as the approach may be, you have to admit that Chirac probably takes some measure of joy in this type of eminently reasonable, completely defensible foot-dragging, if only because this approach is sure to infuriate his opposite number in the White House.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 13:19:02 +0000

ST: Are you saying that Chirac has no right to demand that European money goes to a stable and reliable government and is instead morally obliged to write a blank cheque to any government that pops up, even an obviously kleptocratic one?

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 21:54:26 +0000

I love it. For a while there, I was afraid the Europeans would cave. This is a perfect out for them. Not only did the Bushies poke a finger in their eye and violate the very WTO principals the US added, but if the Bushies had not rushed into an unnecessary war, the US would not now be responsible for Iraq’s debt.

By: st

st — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:36:29 +0000

A side benefit (for Chirac anyway) may be that the Club procedure requires detailed evaluation of the stability and reliability of the government of the subject nation. If the process bogs down, France can always point righteously to the mess in Baghdad, and, by implication, lay the blame for the delay at the feet of the Iraqi government’s American sponsors: “Well, we would have finished long ago, but the Iraqis, they are not ready.”