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Chirac no 'yes' man on Iraq
By Jim Bittermann, CNN Senior Correspondent
PARIS, France (CNN) -- At the left-leaning French newspaper Le Monde, the chief editorial cartoonist is surprised. For once, Plantu says, Jacques Chirac has shown some guts by opposing Washington on Iraq. No matter how the French president may be vilified in the United States, at home his insistence that U.N. arms inspectors should have time to do their job is enormously popular. More than four out of five French, including his usual critics, believe Chirac has got it right on Iraq. "Chirac has total consensus, there is no one in France who wants to go to war. From the left to the right, everyone is opposed to war," says Waddick Doyle of the American University of Paris. "They've lived through occupation and they know what occupation means, and they see the potential dangers in this war." Chirac is frequently characterized here as someone who tries too hard to please -- or, as one commentator put it, "wishy-washy." But he has been anything but that in the confrontation over Iraq. "The big problem with Chirac is he is not very often himself, he is always playing a role, but I think in this case particularly he is really acting himself," says Franz-Olivier Giesbert of Le Point magazine. Analysts scoff at those in the United States who accuse Chirac of trying to protect French trade with Iraq, which amounts to less than one half of 1 percent of the country's overall trade. By going against Washington, they say, Chirac is knowingly excluding France from the billions of dollars in post-war contracts American, British and other allied companies will sign to rebuild Iraq. "He has no sympathy for Saddam Hussein," says Guillaume Parmentier of the French Institute on International Relations. After all, Chirac remembers that Iraq never paid large debts owed to France before the 1991 Gulf War. "As far as the debt is concerned, we have to debunk a myth," says Parmentier. "I mean these debts existed, but they've been written off by the companies more than 10 years ago and therefore are not a factor in policy making." To those who say the French president is being anti-American, Chirac's aides point out that he was the first world leader to visit Ground Zero after September 11, that he lived and worked in the United States, and that he still admires much about the American way of doing things. What's more, according to both French and American military officers, Chirac's persistent offers to help the U.S. militarily in Afghanistan were accepted only after months of rejections by the Pentagon. "I don't think his basic strategy is against the U.S.," says Giesbert. "But his main problem is the Islamic world and the growth of fundamentalism." And therein lies a real concern for Chirac and others: that with Muslims making up nearly 10 percent of France's population, anything which enflames fundamentalism could have a first and direct impact here. Chirac predicted in a magazine interview earlier this month that a war with Iraq, especially one without U.N. backing, will create, as he put it, a lot of little "bin Ladens." "In the mind of Chirac, Saddam Hussein is not an enemy," says Giesbert. "He is an awful dictator, he is an awful man, but he is not the enemy. "For Chirac, the enemy is all the ... fundamentalists you see now growing in the Arabic world."
In that same interview, Chirac said France is not a pacifist nation. He pointed to the troops currently deployed in Ivory Coast, Kosovo and elsewhere. What's more, he added, France helped the United States set up its headquarters in Djibouti, a former French colony, for the war against terror. As Chirac has consistently said for the last six months, France still does not rule out joining a military coalition in Iraq -- but only if U.N. arms inspectors say they are no longer effective, and only if the military action is aimed at disarmament, not a government overthrow. Such an overthrow, Chirac believes, would break long-standing international laws of sovereignty. For those in France who study the United States, it is that apparent obsession of the Bush administration to get rid of Saddam Hussein -- and not just his weapons -- that is the most dangerous. "Allies do not need to be 'yes' men ... in fact they are bad allies if they are 'yes' men," says Parmentier. "So when an ally who has been an ally of the U.S. for 200 years fears that the U.S. is going in the wrong direction, we feel that it is the duty of the ally to say so. "I know that some people, perhaps the majority of people in the U.S., find this difficult to take, but in the end this is probably in the interest of the U.S." In the case of Iraq, no one would ever accuse Jacques Chirac of being a "yes" man. In fact, as he visited the annual French agricultural show a few days ago, there were some in Paris suggesting he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to U.S. Asked if he had a message to those Americans who want to boycott French products -- to declare economic war against France because it opposes real war -- Chirac remained defiant and replied, "Tell them we make the best ham in the world."
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