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French president launches attack on US-led war in Iraq

In a scathing attack of the US-led war in Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac said on Friday that his predictions that the war would spread chaos and more terrorism had come true.

"As France had foreseen and feared, the war in Iraq has sparked upheavals that have yet to show their full effects," Chirac said in his New Year's address at the Elysee Palace to the foreign diplomatic corps.

"This adventure has worsened the divisions among communities and threatened the very integrity of Iraq," Chirac said.

"It has undermined the stability of the entire region, where every country now fears for its security and its independence. It has offered terrorism a new field for expansion," he said.

As US President George W. Bush prepares to unveil this week a new military strategy in Iraq, Chirac added that "the priority, more than ever, is to restore full sovereignty to the Iraqi people."

The single paragraph on Iraq in a speech that addressed many crises and problems around the world was one of Chirac's most pointed justifications for France's decision to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In a sense, the attack was surprising. France's opposition to the war triggered a crisis in French-US relations that has since receded, thanks to close cooperation between the US and France to resolve the crisis in Lebanon and to curb Iran's nuclear program.

As the violence and chaos in Iraq steadily worsened, despite the presence of US troops, the 74-year-old French president tended to avoid reminding the US of its failures there.

After Bush's re-election, for example, Chirac sent him a handwritten "Cher George" letter of congratulations. He also gave a speech expressing hope that 2005 would be a year of "trust" with Bush.

In Friday's speech, Chirac also attacked "the pitfalls of unilateralism," a veiled criticism of the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq without the backing of the UN Security Council.

He repeated his approval of the emergence of a "multipolar world" as countries like China, India and Brazil assume "the status of global powers."
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