Anti-war nations brace for payback

By CATHERINE FIELD, Herald correspondent

PARIS - France and its ally Germany will start to count the cost of their successful campaign to deny Britain, the United States and Spain the United Nations seal of approval for war on Iraq.

They face being sidelined from decisions that will reshape the Middle East and having their own ambitions for Europe damaged.

A summit in the mid-Atlantic Portuguese islands of the Azores, featuring President George W. Bush of the US, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar takes place today to confer on the Iraqi crisis.

But it is less a confab than a council of war, the location of which has clearly been chosen to give support for Bush's European friends and to show that the dissenters are no longer part of the inner circle of power.

At best, the pro-war camp will come up with proposals for a little more time, backed by a revamped UN resolution, for Iraq to show it is serious about disarming.

But that seems unlikely. On the eve of the summit, France, Germany and Russia asked for a new UN Security Council meeting tomorrow at foreign ministers' level, apparently to prevent the slide to war.

But they said again that they would continue to oppose any timetable for conflict.

The alternative is that the three pro-war countries will cut their losses and declare that the UN path has led nowhere - which can only be a countdown to the first airstrike.

Either outcome is a clear diplomatic victory for President Jacques Chirac of France and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in their effort to combat US unilateralism and uphold the UN as the source of international legitimacy.

Nor, in contrast to what the American media are saying, are they acting fancifully or out of spite.

They reflect a clear majority of European opinion, which has hardened in the past month as the White House hawks try to denigrate their opposition and warn darkly of reprisals.

Now, though, comes the reckoning for their bold strategy.

The first signs will emerge this week, in Nato - the bridge between the US and Europe - and in the European Union.

"We have no illusions. We are in an extremely difficulty international and domestic situation," said a spokesman for Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission. "We hope our leaders understand the gravity of the situation and the implications for the EU."

But Chirac, just as much as Blair and Bush, has left himself very little room for manoeuvre.

Yesterday from Tokyo to Beirut, Paris to Washington, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch global protest against any war.

Protests ranged from the release of pigeons into the skies over Bangkok as symbols of peace to the burning of effigies of President Bush in Kolkata and the Gaza Strip.

Tens of thousands of people from more than 100 US cities surrounded the White House to voice their opposition to war.

The numbers appeared lower than in a similar worldwide protest on February 15, when the number of demonstrators was put at upward of 4 million and perhaps as high as 10 million.

The controversy over Iraq will bring a dark, poisonous mood to the annual EU spring summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday where Blair, Chirac, Aznar and Schroeder will gather around the table.

There could be the first row over whether the EU will pay towards reconstructing Iraq after the war.

The EU's external affairs commissioner, Chris Patten, has warned that without a UN mandate for war, Europe would be unlikely to stump up for this, a position likely to infuriate Britain and Spain.

Then there is the question of institutional reform so that the EU can face the "big bang" next year, when its numbers expand from 15 countries to 25.

The proposals, driven by France and Germany, seek to streamline decision-making by reducing a country's right of veto in the Council of Ministers and in naming an EU president.

Blair, after his humiliation by Chirac, can be expected to squash French federalist thinking along these lines and to find support among eastern European candidate countries who resent the French President for giving them a tongue-lashing last month for supporting Washington.

Such is the frost between Blair and Chirac that Downing St last week accused France of "poisoning" the diplomatic bloodstream with its intransigence.

To make matters worse, the British Prime Minister's office has revealed that Blair has not accepted a crate of cognac given to him last month by Chirac after their meeting.

This resentment will be translated at the negotiation table into demands for national sovereignty to be paramount in the reformed EU.

That would cripple the hope of the unifiers who want the EU to speak with a strong, single voice that would make it equal to the US on the world stage.

The situation in Nato is even more dire, for the US is outraged by the refusal of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg to back military assistance for Turkey.

Washington has warned of cutting back its troop numbers in Germany, the first sign that it will ignore Nato in its strategic thinking and instead assemble "coalitions of the willing" for dealing with crises.

If that is the case, Nato will not have much of a future as a credible organisation.

Charles Powell, former foreign policy advisory to ex-British Premier Margaret Thatcher, says the row is "as bad as we have seen".

"But when it is all over and Iraq has been dealt with, France and Germany are still there, Britain is still there, America is still there and they have to get on together again.

"So the prime task will be to repair it. The question will be how."

- additional reporting Reuters

Herald Feature: Iraq