PARIS—In the days immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, French President Jacques Chirac hurried across the Atlantic to become the first foreign leader to show solidarity with the United States in person. He viewed Ground Zero from a helicopter and stood side by side with "my friend George" at the White House. But now that George W(Getty Images)...

KEITH RICHBURG
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

PARIS—In the days immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, French President Jacques Chirac hurried across the Atlantic to become the first foreign leader to show solidarity with the United States in person.

He viewed Ground Zero from a helicopter and stood side by side with "my friend George" at the White House.

But now that George W. Bush seems set on a military showdown with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Chirac has become Washington's bête noire.

While Bush says time has run out for Iraq, Chirac insists at every opportunity that U.N. weapons inspectors should have more time to work.

While Bush continues war preparations, Chirac says war must come only as a last resort.

And while Bush maintains that the United States has the right to act alone, Chirac counters that any attack without U.N. Security Council approval would be illegitimate.

Last week, in a fresh attempt to slow the rush to war, Chirac appeared with Russian President Vladimir Putin to announce a French-German-Russian peace plan for Iraq.

On Friday, Chirac sent his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, to the Security Council to stare down U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in declaring that weapons inspections "are producing results" and that there is no justification yet for war.

The French government's consistent refusal to back the United States has infuriated and flummoxed U.S. officials and brought a sharp deterioration in relations between Washington and Paris.

Some Americans are wondering openly what Chirac is up to.

And some have fallen back on crude stereotypes, such as the French being reflexively anti-American, driven by commercial interests or obsessed with restoring their country's lost grandeur.

But on this side of the Atlantic, the 70-year-old Chirac is more commonly viewed as a principled elder statesmen who reflects widely held sentiments among Europeans that war with Iraq is wrong, with or without U.N. approval.

"There's a basic reason why Chirac is trying to avoid a war if at all possible," says Jacques Beltran of the French International Relations Institute.

Beltran says Chirac "believes a war is extremely dangerous. There's the risk of destabilizing Iraq and the whole region, as well as Israel."

Analysts say Chirac fears that a war with a large number of Iraqi civilian casualties could enflame the Muslim world, destroying relationships he spent much of his political life building and nurturing.

He believes that terrorism could well increase, not decrease, after an attack on Iraq.

He is also aware that roughly 10 per cent of the people living within France's borders are Muslim, among them a significant number of radicals who could spread violence on his country's streets.

"We are not pacifists," says one French official familiar with Chirac's thinking.

"But we honestly think it is a mistake to go to war. You will pay the price in terms of terrorism, in terms of the Arab world versus the Western world."

Yves Meny, a French political scientist at the European University Institute in Florence, says Chirac is driven mainly by geopolitical considerations.

"Don't forget, France has a strong and close relationship with nearby Muslim countries that were our former colonies — Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Relationships with the Arab world play a very important role."

Chirac's defenders and most independent analysts scoff at the notion that he is displaying an ingrained anti-Americanism.

Chirac, they point out, often boasts of his student-day travels in the United States, where he learned to speak English and worked as a soda jerk in 1953 at a Howard Johnson's restaurant (reportedly earning a certificate of merit for his outstanding banana splits) .

"You'd be hard-pressed to find a more pro-American French president," says Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Centre on the United States.

"I think this is a very pro-American president. He likes America."

French public opinion was very much behind U.S. action in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. At its start, 71 per cent of the French public was in favour of war. But "this is a very different situation," says Stephane Rozes, director of the CSA-TMO polling group.

One difference, Rozes says, is that French attitudes have changed and "a majority today thinks the United States uses superpower status not at the service of the international community, but for their own interests."

A poll published in last weekend's Le Monde newspaper showed 76 per cent of respondents opposed to a war, compared with just 18 per cent in favour.

Many European leaders have gone against opinion polls such as this one. Tony Blair of Britain, José Maria Aznar of Spain and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, among others, have put their governments firmly in the American camp.

Analysts here say some European leaders might privately share Chirac's reservations but do not want to risk damaging relations with Washington.

Chirac, re-elected last year by a huge margin and in his final term as president, may feel less inhibited about saying what he thinks, they say.

In addition, his right of centre Rally for the Republic party controls the legislature, freeing him from the enfeebling "cohabitation" — a power-sharing arrangement with the formerly dominant Socialists — that turned him into largely a ceremonial leader for most of his first term.

The president has been dealing with the Arab world for three decades, notes one senior government official, referring to Chirac's tenure as prime minister as far back as 1974.

He made a trip to Baghdad in that period and met Saddam Hussein, whose Ba'ath party first came to power in 1968.

WASHINGTON POST

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