To the Edge of Unreality: The Conceit that the Cartesian French Have the Gifts of Insight, Low-Key Rationality, and Special Leverage in the Arab World

In the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur dissects the messy French analysis of its Iraq hostage crisis:

'We told them that we were French journalists, there to do our job, and particularly to show the realities of the resistance," Georges Malbrunot said, recounting his first contacts with the Islamic fundamentalists who held him hostage for four months in Iraq.

Rather like a business card, this weltanschauung was offered up to his abductors immediately after Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot were seized Aug. 20 on the road between Baghdad and Najaf.

Handcuffed by a group of masked men, Malbrunot said, he explained to them: "Every time in history that there's an occupation, there's resistance. We distanced ourselves from the Americans right away and stuck to the French position. France's position is to say the occupation is illegal, so from this point on, the war is illegal."

After 124 days in captivity, Malbrunot, who was working for Le Figaro, and Chesnot, employed by the state-owned Radio France Internationale, were freed on Dec. 21.

Yet rather than living a self-celebratory moment through the release of two cool and resilient reporters, France has fallen since into a recriminatory debate about why they were not gotten out sooner. This perceived government failure, and the continuing backbiting around it, devastates a couple of already shaky local conceits: that the French hold special leverage in the Arab world and insights worthy of Descartes into its functioning.

Since his release, Malbrunot has described himself as trying to remain Cartesian and humble in dealing with his captors. After all, during the ordeal of his detention, and in line with the logic France has brought to the aftermath of the war — dismissing the notion of a clash of civilizations in Iraq as a hysterical, essentially Yankee construct, and arguing that the French stand at wisdom's remove from it — who was to say a little low-keyed rationality might not have been the best way out of this mess?

But Malbrunot's account of what happened, and the discussion about the government's brassy overconfidence in trying to prise the men free, show the attempts to rescue the journalists, and perhaps France's notion of its place in the Middle East, pushing at the edges of unreality.

… A month or so into their captivity, a kind of creeping epiphany reached out and grabbed at Malbrunot's French world view. "Little by little," he wrote, "we came to discover we were really on planet bin Laden."

An existential contradiction: in Paris's definition of evil, bin Laden's Qaeda constellation is a terrorist one, whose forces French units are fighting in Afghanistan, and hardly armed resisters against an illegal occupation.

Malbrunot's account points to his coming to the conclusion in September that if the Cartesian in him bolstered his very real courage and lucidity, his Frenchness, and making the case to his captors that this rendered his kidnapping just a misunderstanding among reasonable men, would not get him far.

… During the same period, Foreign Minister Michel Barnier and a right-wing Gaullist member of the National Assembly named Didier Julia were working through Arab intermediaries to free the hostages. But their confused, although parallel, efforts failed in very public ignominy. In early October, Julia charged Barnier, who appears to have facilitated his free-lance undertaking, with incompetence, and Barnier accused Julia of putting the hostages' lives at risk through his operation.

What was certain: the French government's embarrassment at having signaled at the outset that the France-friendly pressure of solidarity from the region's Muslims made the journalists' freedom only a matter of days. Perhaps more excruciatingly, as prospects dimmed, Barnier offered up a message to the hostage-takers that sounded like France promising international recognition (participation for "groups and people who have currently chosen armed resistance" at a conference on Iraq's future) to those Malbrunot had come to see as Islamic terrorists.

For his efforts, the reply Barnier got from the Islamic Army in Iraq was a statement that France's history with the Muslims was filled "with hate and blood," and that if France hadn't joined the Americans in the Iraq war, it was "for its own interests and not for the good of the Iraqi people."

More than two more months pass. The journalists come home, their freedom obtained by what Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie called "an exclusively French operation," officially without strings or ransom or gunfire — although one the weekly Le Canard Enchainé says cost France €15 million, or $19.5 million, in payoffs.

In fact, the accounts of what happened appear increasingly out of plumb.

Julia, whose two associates were placed under investigation last week with the extravagant charge of illegal contacts with foreign powers, has threatened the government with embarrassing new disclosures, while Barnier now admits the hostages' families told him to leave Julia alone to try to arrange their release. …

In describing [the despair of the months of fear and humiliation], Malbrunot made something of an admission. "One day," he said, "we had a blowout in the middle of a road. I said to myself, 'If only an American patrol would come through, take out this lovely bunch, and set us free."'

But the Cartesian in him hadn't vanished for long. Malbrunot's next words: "That, however, could have been dangerous for us."

(MiF commented on this article earlier today…)