FRANCE: There was no mistaking the absolute hostility of French parliamentarians yesterday to President Bush's Iraqi policy, though they laced their speeches with protestations of friendship for the United States.
The debate in the National Assembly had been postponed to allow deputies to react to Mr Bush's speech in Cincinnati on Monday night. The Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, opened the session by implying that Washington was motivated by designs on Iraqi petrol, saying the US holds "a simplistic vision of the war between good and evil" and applies double standards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And Mr Raffarin was by far the most conciliatory. The ruling centre-right stressed repeatedly that the UN Security Council - not Washington - makes international law. Right-wing politicians credited President Jacques Chirac with forcing Mr Bush to temper his language in Cincinnati. Deputies from right and left accused the US of domination and imperialism, while the opposition demanded that France use its veto in the Security Council to prevent war in the Middle East.
Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, president of the Socialist group in the assembly, noted that one year ago his party expressed its "total solidarity with the American people and their leaders in the fight against terrorism". That struggle must remain the priority, Mr Ayrault said.
The US administration was doing the world a disservice by confusing it with plans for intervention in Iraq. "No proof of complicity between Iraq and al-Qaeda has been provided," he said. Nor did the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, provide convincing evidence concerning weapons of mass destruction in his report to the House of Commons.
President Saddam Hussein was "a wicked, underhanded dictator", Mr Ayrault continued - something all speakers agreed on. But since Mr Saddam said he would obey international law, "nothing authorises America to dictate a war and that is what is happening".
The US was "intimidating" the international community; Mr Bush's rhetoric was "arrogant and unilateralist". The US-British draft Security Council resolution was "the detonator for intervention" in which "America reserves the right to send troops to Iraq for any reason, at any time. Let us not be fooled. The doctrine of 'preventive war' is nothing but a hyper right to intervention for a hyper power."
When Mr Ayrault castigated Mr Bush for "wiping out 50 years of collective security to return to an imperial order", he was cheered by the left but booed by the right. The US administration "is drifting towards a crusade with overtones of tele-evangelism against what it calls 'the axis of evil'."
The Socialist politician demanded that France "refuse to provide political or military support to an Anglo-American military intervention". French policy is that force may be used as a last resort, but only with Security Council approval. Mr Ayrault asked Mr Chirac to "come out of \ ivory tower" and declare that France will veto any UN resolution making war on Iraq.
Mr Alain Juppé, the former prime minister who heads President Chirac's UMP party, said: "It would be irresponsible for France to brandish the threat of a veto today." If Mr Bush spoke of "the disarmament of Iraq" on Monday night and said that a US military intervention was "neither imminent nor inevitable", it was because French diplomacy was carrying the day.
France's friendship for the US enabled her to speak frankly, to warn the Bush administration that it risked destroying the international coalition constituted after September 11th, Mr Juppé said.
"We French have no desire to head off on a crusade against 'the axis of evil' nor to commit ourselves to what is apparently called, in some American circles, 'creative destruction' in the Middle East." The line between good and evil "sometimes shifts, according to certain national interests - including petroleum," Mr Chirac's closest adviser concluded.
Was Europe "congenitally doomed to paralysis in all major international crises?" Mr Juppé asked, echoing the concern of several speakers. As a convinced European, it was painful for him to admit that this seemed to be the case with Iraq, as it had been in the Balkans. Yet "the French position suits the majority of our European partners", he added.