Imagine if, instead of serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton were going on trial this week for attempting to sabotage Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last year by leaking forged documents to the Justice Department implicating him in taking bribes from shady Chicago developers. Surely that would be worthy of being hyped as “the trial of the century.”
Well that, essentially, is what is now taking place in Paris. Because former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin went on trial yesterday on charges of “complicity in false accusation, complicity in using forgeries, receipt of stolen property and breach of trust” – all in an effort to sabotage the candidacy of his rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, for the presidency in 2007.
Both men were ministers under former President Jacques Chirac, and were engaged in overt (and, evidently, some covert) machinations to succeed him.
In this case, de Villepin is alleged to have masterminded a scheme to provide French authorities with forged documents implicating Sarkozy in taking bribes from international arms dealers. He faces up to five years in prison and a $65,000 fine.
Of course, regular readers know that I was a rather avid supporter of Sarkozy’s socialist rival, Segolene Royal, who I hoped would become the first female president of France. Therefore, nothing would have pleased me more during that campaign than to have Sarkozy exposed for taking bribes.
It must seem incomprehensible, however, that the patrician de Villepin feared the upstart Sarkozy so much that he would have stooped to such dirty tricks to defeat him. Indeed, de Villepin insists that the charges are pursuant to nothing more than an obsessive vendetta against him:
I am here because of one man’s will. I am here because of the dogged determination of one man, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also president of the French republic. I will come out of this a free man and exonerated. I know that truth will prevail.
Perhaps; but I doubt de Villepin has clean hands in this messy affair. For I recall that no less a person than former US Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell accused him of even worse perfidy. And in his book, The French Betrayal of America, Kenneth Timmerman, a New York Times best-selling author who lived and worked as an investigative reporter in France for 18 years, documents this.
According to Timmerman, Powell claims that the primary reason he prevailed upon President George W. Bush to seek another UN resolution on Iraq was that he had secured firm assurances from de Villepin (then foreign minister) that France would join the US’s coalition of the willing to invade that country if its dictator, Saddam Hussein, refused yet again to comply with the terms in that resolution to avoid war.
Instead, however, Powell laments that de Villepin used a special meeting of the UN Security Council on January 20, 2003 to denounce the US, insisting that “nothing justifies envisioning military action” in Iraq.
Alas, what Powell could not have imagined back then was that de Villepin was quite willing to betray 225 years of Franco-American friendship, ironically, for bribes from Saddam in the form of exclusive oil deals and cold cash … allegedly.
(In fact, the Volcker Commission’s final report on the UN oil-for-food program documents many the lucrative contracts French companies got from Saddam, which all smack of quid pro quo because the French government voiced such adamant opposition to imposing sanctions, and going to war, against Iraq.)
Admittedly, since the war turned out to be a costly misadventure – based on “faulty intelligence” – de Villepin’s betrayal now seems inspired.
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that the subtext of this trial is meting out poetic justice to de Villepin for his Machiavellian dealings with Powell (and no doubt many others).
So here’s to a just verdict….
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