By David Ignatius

Wednesday, February 5, 2003; Page A23

PARIS -- With so much bad news in the world these days, it may seem strange to go looking for more. But the little-noticed diplomatic and military reversals in West Africa of a certain European nation are instructive, to say the least, about the unintended consequences of intervening abroad.

The foreign interventionist in this case is none other than France. Yes, the same country that has been so critical lately of the United States for its plans to intervene militarily in Iraq. But this intervention is different, insist the French, because they have support from the United Nations and the Bush administration. Maybe so, but it's still proving to be something of a disaster.

The drama is being played out in Ivory Coast, a prosperous former colony of France often described as the jewel of West Africa. But in the past several years, the country has veered toward civil war between its mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south. The French finally decided to jump in last fall and put things right.

Now they have a bloody mess on their hands -- with anti-French rioting in Abidjan over the past week that threatens the estimated 15,000 French expatriates there. A top French official described them in an interview Monday as virtual hostages. And there's fear of a much wider ethnic slaughter, should peace efforts fail.

The chain of events in faraway Ivory Coast is complicated but worth unraveling. It shows that even the most well-intentioned plans have a way of going awry. It's not that the French were wrong to intervene. Rather, the lesson is that foreign intervention inevitably sets off chain reactions that are difficult to control.

Ivory Coast officially gained independence from France in 1960, but the French retained a strong role there. Conservative President Jacques Chirac wanted to intervene when a military coup deposed the Ivorian government in December 1999, but he was blocked by his then-prime minister, the socialist Lionel Jospin. The French lived uneasily with the new president, Laurent Gbagbo, who took office in October 2000.

After Chirac won resounding victories in last year's presidential and parliamentary elections, he was free to play a more assertive role in Africa. A challenge arose last fall when Ivory Coast rebels attempted a coup and seized about half the country. Chirac dispatched his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, to Abidjan to try to broker a peace deal. The French also sent in troops, now numbering about 3,000, to maintain order.

French officials warned darkly that the Muslim rebels might be supported by al Qaeda. Instead, Western diplomats say the rebels' key financial backer is most likely the neighboring country of Burkina Faso, which has close ties to France, too.

The Franco-African stew began to thicken in December. The French ambassador to Ivory Coast was dismissed after he warned that Gbagbo was an unreliable ally. French troops, meanwhile, were drawn deeper into the conflict -- to the point that one French official fretted in January, "We are in another Vietnam."

Late last month, Chirac brokered a peace accord during a summit of African leaders in Paris. The terms were surprisingly generous to rebels who had waged an armed insurrection, granting them two key ministries, defense and interior. The deal briefly seemed to be working, and the French were celebrating their bold diplomacy.

And then, blooey! Last week, pro-government mobs attacked the French embassy, a French cultural center and a French school in Abidjan. The rioters protested that Chirac had forced too many concessions on Gbagbo.

"France has disappointed us," a pro-Gbagbo protester told the Associated Press. "They gave power to people who took up arms against Ivory Coast. They have opened Pandora's box."

The real problem, says the top French official, is that "Gbagbo is not a man of his word." This official contends the Ivorian leader signed off on all the terms his supporters have since denounced.

Now the priority of the French is to protect their 15,000 "hostages" in Abidjan; later they can worry about brokering a new political accord. Meanwhile, analysts fear that ethnic tensions could spiral out of control, with vengeful Ivorians attacking the roughly 3 million immigrants from Burkina Faso. It's a situation eerily reminiscent of Rwanda, where the Hutu-Tutsi tribal slaughter was unwittingly fostered by a French military intervention in 1994.

All of which is to say that nothing is as simple as it first looks. Chirac might well explain to President Bush that some foreign interventions are worth the risk, nevertheless. To which the American leader might respond: Cher ami, that's what I've been trying to tell you about Iraq.