Muammar Gaddafi’s state visit to France was always going to be a mistake, and now on its third day with two left to go I imagine that Sarkozy is rueing the day he ever heard of those wretched Bulgarian nurses. Rather more to the point, he is now perhaps beginning to realise why others were treading carefully to get them released, rather than rushing in flash-guns popping. In a different perspective and to different degree he is making the same mistake as his barbecue friend George W. Bush – not thinking things through.

On the day the Guide was due to land at Charles De Gaulle Nicolas Sarkozy’s minister for Human Rights, Rama Yade, gave an outspoken interview in Le Parisien newspaper, saying amongst other things that the Colonel “must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come to wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet.” Strong stuff. Sarkozy had arranged for his Human Rights minister to say some mildly corrective things about the Libyan leader, in order to stifle anything the opposition might say, but he hadn’t expected Ms Yade to express herself quite in those terms. In other words he had expected her to express himself, not herself. Apparently the difference threw him into a rage. His carefully orchestrated plan to control the media went further awry when, having assured us all that he had indeed raised the thorny question of human rights with the Guide at the official dinner, the Guide gagged over his baklava and cried Nonsense. He told an interviewer on French television that Sarkozy never mentioned Human Rights once. “Oh yes he did,” cry the party faithful, “we heard him.” From the number who swear they heard Sarkozy discuss the matter with the Guide at dinner, it is clear they must have been screaming at each other. A more gentle explanation for the Guide’s insistence that he never even heard the dreaded words is that perhaps the message got lost in translation – or the translator bottled out. Or maybe those two words simply don’t exist in Arabic, in the way the word “privacy” doesn’t exist in French, so there is no way to express them. Colonel Gaddafi is well-known for his selective hearing, but unfortunately M. Sarkozy is rapidly getting a reputation for selective speaking – what he tells us he said to, say, Vladimir Putin is later flatly contradicted by, say, Vladimir Putin. The Guide learns faster than Speedy Sarkozy.

Just to put the Human Rights business and Ms Yade’s objections in recent context, the Bulgarian nurses, and in particular the Palestinian doctor arrested with them, have detailed the most gruesome tortures inflicted on them – not eons ago in Gaddafi’s terrorist past, but recently, since the Libyan leader has been welcomed back into the nice people’s pack.

Sarkozy’s justification for inviting Gaddafi is money. He said on Monday evening, during all the uproar about Human Rights, that the trip was worth 10 billion euro. Given sums like that, he added, who can criticise me? Cheque-book politics cannot be any more honourable than cheque-book journalism, but M. Sarkozy makes no bones about believing that money makes the world go round. It now appears that much of that 10 billion is in possible orders and vague promises for future possible orders for Airbus and Areva nuclear reactors. That shows the wider problem facing the French President. He has told us the coffers are empty. His job is to try to fill them. France is making some excellent products and making them extremely well, the problem is they are mostly big, very expensive and almost always things people can live perfectly well without: Airbus, nuclear reactors, TGV trains (which need the rails to run on, don’t forget – that’s where the money is), fabulous viaducts. Very few people really need those things – except the French workers who make them. Unlike China, which far more sensibly concentrates on making something cheap that everyone needs, clothes.

Few countries can afford those enormous investments, and if they can it is usually because they do not spend their money on health services, education, stuff like that. Nowadays countries which look after their people don’t usually have enough money over for the big toys. That restricts Sarkozy’s choice. To sell his mega-toys Sarkozy has to deal with leaders who have mega-reserves of money in the form of natural energy. He also has to go where the other travelling salesmen, German, Scandinavian, British, American, Spanish, have not already cleaned up. By and large that either means the huge and utterly ruthless countries who will play with you while it suits them and spit you out when it doesn’t, or it means you have to deal with people known to be either unsavoury or unstable or both. The leaders Sarkozy has made a special effort to see recently are Chinese, Russian, Algerian, Moroccan, Venezuelan, Libyan and, well, American.

Of course running a country is a dirty business, but most Western leaders do their business more subtly. They do deals, but they also make sure they are seen in the troubled hot-spots of the Middle East, or they solve an intractable problem like Northern Ireland. So far Sarkozy has not done much of that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:39 am and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.