Texas Songwriter said "This report seems reasonalby plausible"
I think there probably was a French connection, but the core theory advanced here has the timing all wrong. The Niger forgery was set in motion in early 2001, when the materials later used in the forgery were stolen from the Nigerien embassy. The forgery itself had been executed by fall 2001. Thus, there was little correspondence in time between the period in which the French were playing games in the UN (early 2003) and the timing of the forgery itself. Unless the French have far more intelligence than I'd give them credit for, they can't have known in Jan. 2001 that Bush planned to go to war against Iraq 2 years later nor can they even have known WMD would be an important factor in justifying such a war. As a practical matter, Saddam had defied UN sanctions for a decade and was daily shooting at US pilots seeking to enforce the No Fly zone. There were plausible grounds for attacking Saddam purely on grounds that the first Gulf war never had ended etc.
The motivation therefore is more likely aimed at providing a cover for a calculated French decision to profit even more from the Iraq mess by illegally selling yellowcake to Saddam through its wholly owned subsidiary: Niger.
My theory exactly. Hadn't considered the timing of the theft of the items used in the forgery.
Now, what where the roles of Joe and Valerie Wilson in all of this? Dupes of French intelligence? Or accomplices?