France Gloats As Bush & Blair Squirm Over Missing Iraqi WMD

by Julio Godoy

But the government is for the most part diplomatically avoiding any comment.

"The people who claimed to promote the religion of truth and to act on behalf of humanity and democracy have lied to us on practically every subject," Jean Daniel, publisher of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur wrote in an editorial this week.

"A new regrouping of all nations to organize legitimate resistance to U.S. hegemony is necessary," Daniel wrote. "A geo-strategic vision of international affairs opposed to that of the U.S. neo-conservative ideologues should emerge, to check Washington modelling the world at will."

President Jacques Chirac declared during the G8 summit in Evian over the weekend that "I haven't changed an iota in my view of the crisis, and what we have learnt since the war has confirmed my position."

Most top French officials, however, are maintaining a careful silence in the face of opinions expressed around the country that would vindicate the government's opposition to the war.

The French opposition has led U.S. officials to downgrade bilateral cooperation in military, diplomatic, and commercial affairs.

Official silence about the suspect weapons allegations is thus being seen here as an attempt to ease tensions between Paris and Washington and London.

The newspapers Le Monde and Liberation devoted whole sections to alleged distortions put out by the U.S. and British governments before and during the attack against Iraq. The cover of the weekend edition of Liberation carried a photograph of U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair walking together, under the title "Iraq - Liars?"

Liberation wrote that practically all claims that the U.S. and the British governments had made before the United Nations Security Council about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "were either exaggerated or plainly faked."

Those claims have implications beyond accusations against Iraq, it said. Public opinion around the world had been manipulated, the paper said.

"The whole story around Jessica Lynch, from her purported capture by Iraqi forces after a fierce battle to her supposed rescue by U.S. soldiers is fiction," the newspaper said. "Lynch has no memories of her heroic battle."

The loss of credibility of the U.S. and the British governments as a result is worrying "because it endangers the fight against terrorism and the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," Liberation's deputy director Patrick Sabatier told IPS. "And for the rest of the world it is disquieting to see again the propensity of the U.S. and the British governments to lie, in order to justify so-called preventive wars."

Le Monde called the U.S.-British allegations about the Iraqi arsenals "the biggest lie told by state officials in recent history." Like Liberation, Le Monde has had a campaign running for weeks now on the "lies" the U.S. and British officials told the UN Security Council, and the faking of key moments of the war.

French experts on intelligence have condemned the abuse of intelligence agencies to build a case for the war. "The intelligence community is very much like a supermarket," historian Alexis Debat, who is working on a book on the CIA told IPS. "It delivers to you whatever you're looking for."

Eric Denece, also an intelligence analyst, says that "the secret services, be it in Europe, or in North America, never said that they had definitive proof that Iraq was in recent possession of weapons of mass destruction." Politicians in the U.S. and Britain "ordered secret services to say what they wanted to hear, to pretend to have an objective basis to present publicly," Denece added.