Thank you. Frankly, the oil explanation for France's stance does not appear to make much sense: Total's deals cannot be exploited as long as Saddam stays in power and Iraq remains a pariah state. The only positive developement for Total's interests would be a regime change, and then France would ensure that the current deals are maintained with the new regime. The best and only way to achieve this would have been for France to support America all along the way and be rewarded in the end. What France has done the last few weeks is, in effect, turning America into a bitter foe, who will work hard to punish France and hence Total once this is over. Hence I am more than sceptical with this explanation.
Right. Now I'm only talking through my hat, and have no hard evidence at all on which to base my line of inquiry. But, if we assume for the sake of argument that the caricature of "Bush the Oil Man" has some basis in reality, then I could imagine a scenario in which the US administration played France "b*lls to the wall" and never really left open an option for France to preserve a reasonable financial interest in Iraq, and thus no option to climb down gracefully from its obstructionist stance.
It would have been an extremely aggressive policy for the US to pursue, and one that could have forced France into where it stands today. For this reason alone I do not consider it very likely that this is what happened, but stranger things are found in history books.
Note that I am not claiming that US/UK greed brought us to this point, but I would like to see some smart investigative journalists dig into this possibility.
(I hope I don't get banned from FreeRepublic now.)