Today's Breaking News

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has shown a remarkable foreign-policy turnaround by jumping into conflicts in Libya and Ivory Coast.

By The Associated Press and The New York Times

PARIS — This year, in both Libya and Ivory Coast, one country has launched military strikes and dragged the international community into action against entrenched autocrats: France.
It's the same France that vigorously opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq eight years ago and has advocated trying every possible approach before bringing in the guns in other world crises.
French peacekeeping troops Tuesday attacked the presidential palace in Ivory Coast in support of the United Nations while French planes were attacking the troops of the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi. French forces also are fighting alongside the United States in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

With the loser of the Ivory Coast election, Laurent Gbagbo, negotiating surrender in Abidjan, France's intervention in its former colony may prove to be of short duration. France hopes to be as lucky in the war against Gadhafi, who seems to be in the initial stages of trying to negotiate an exit.

In both instances, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was the most active supporter of robust military action. But Sarkozy and his government have emphasized that they are using military force in the name of the United Nations, not out of any colonial impulse, with the aim of saving lives.

He claimed the use of force was justified by recent U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding the protection of civilians — a quick implementation of an idea, "the right to protect," that has been floated for a decade.
Now, both Security Council resolutions, 1973 for Libya (sponsored by France, Britain and Lebanon and passed March 17), and 1975 for Ivory Coast (sponsored by France and Nigeria and passed March 30), are viewed as precedents for authorizing military responses to humanitarian crises.

Peacekeeping troops have been in Ivory Coast under various mandates since the civil war of 2002, when French troops separated both sides in what was probably the last old-style French intervention in Africa.

Some have suggested that Sarkozy, who is at historical lows in the opinion polls, with a presidential election next year, is acting tough to stir up patriotism.
"If Sarkozy could do it, he would declare a war every week," said Didier Mathus, an opposition socialist legislator on the foreign-affairs committee of Parliament.

French voters, however, remain deeply worried about the country's continuing commitments in Afghanistan, where many think the war has been lost.

Some say the potential price of inaction in Libya and Ivory Coast may have weighed on Sarkozy.
Analysts say the extraordinary turnaround may be rooted in a revival by Sarkozy of traditional French notions of high-minded interventionism, as well as an attempt by the French leader to ease Europe away from its longtime dependence on the U.S. security umbrella.
Within the European Union, France and Britain are the biggest military heavyweights in a bloc where some countries, notably economic powerhouse Germany, are hesitant to see their troops on foreign battlefields — a hang-up that most French don't have.
At a time of upheaval in the Arab world and Asia's rising economic might, experts say, France wants to boost Europe's relevance with tough, human rights-based military interventions and quash rumblings about the continent's decline.
Bruno Tertrais, another French defense expert, said Sarkozy might be seeking to compensate for "the failure of French diplomacy on Tunisia," where the French were largely supportive of an autocratic regime as a mass uprising there toppled it.
Sarkozy's former foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, a socialist, agreed that Sarkozy seemed inclined to act quickly after remaining relatively passive during the Tunisian and Egyptian protests. Jean-Dominique Giuliani, chairman of the Robert Schuman Foundation think tank, said France wants to move past hard lessons like those from the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia, where delays, debates and ineffective diplomacy led to many civilian deaths. "The lesson of the Balkans was massacres, with French soldiers held hostage, terrible images — and with the Americans finally coming to help us restore order," Giuliani said.
Sarkozy knows the upside of European activism: During France's European Union presidency in 2008, he drew credit for helping negotiate an end to fighting between Russia and Georgia.