Mr. Chirac will live to regret this. It was smallminded and from a small man.
This would have been a good time for Chirac to shutup.
Yes, and it's typical of him telling the Eastern European countries, candidate EU members, that they had "missed a good opportunity to be quiet", after several had expressed support for the invasion of Iraq.
Chirac had been friends with Saddam since 1970. In fact, he negotiated the sale of the French-built nuclear plant, named Osiris, to Iraq. Unfortunately for Saddam, the Israelis took it out in 1981.
But Saddam signed over a hundred billion dollars in oil and other contracts to France in the year or so before the invasion. Chirac wiggled, back-stabbed, manipulated the U.N., anything to save his sugar-daddy but to no avail.
Now he's mad, he doesn't control the new president of Iraq, and he's lost all those incredibly juicy contracts. No wonder he can't stand Bush.:)