The IHT ran a fascinating article today about the feud that wasn’t between the United States and France over the UN resolution regarding Iraq. The story reports that the feud was in fact a cleverly constructed gambit that enabled France to regain some international standing at the expense of Germany (which took itself out of the game when Gerhard Schroeder announced his total opposition to war in Iraq during the campaign there) and enabled the United States to pick up some multilateral clout in its dispute with Iraq. The more attention I pay to world events, the more I realize that my understanding of what’s really going on is established at a level several times too high to be of much use. The conventional wisdom thusfar has been that France was staunchly opposed to war in Iraq because French businesses stood to lose a lot of business if we invaded. Maybe that’s not so.