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Iraq: France tried a behind-the-scenes deal?

By Ewen MacAskill—@ Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

LONDON, APRIL 5. The French Government offered a surprise compromise to the U.S. President, George Bush, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, according to a detailed investigation published in Vanity Fair this week.

The report undermines the public perception of France standing resolutely against the U.S. and Britain in the United Nations Security Council as the two countries tried to win a second resolution in support of war.

According to a 25,000-word investigation into the diplomatic wranglings in that pre-war period, the French Government was offering to cut a behind-the-scenes deal with the U.S. Government.

At a lunch in the White House on January 13 last year, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, an adviser to the French President, Jacques Chirac, and Jean-David Levitte, the French Ambassador in Washington, put the deal to Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. National Security Adviser.

In an effort to avoid a bitter U.S.-French row, the French officials suggested that, if the U.S. was intent on war, it should not seek the second resolution, according to highly placed U.S. sources cited by Vanity Fair.

Instead, the two said that the first resolution on Iraq, 1441, passed the previous year, provided enough legal cover for war and that France would keep quiet if the U.S. went to war on that basis.

The deal would suit the French by maintaining its ``good cop'' status in the Arab world and safeguarding Franco-U.S. relations. But the deal died when (the British Prime Minister) Tony Blair led a doomed attempt to secure a second resolution to try to satisfy Labour MPs and government lawyers who questioned the legitimacy of the war. France ultimately vetoed the resolution.

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