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Eating humble pie is not something that comes easily to Jacques Chirac. Accustomed to the flunkies and gilt splendour of the Elysee Palace and his ego nicely inflated by last year's election victories, the word humility has not been in the French President's lexicon for some time. So, faced with France's biggest diplomatic setback in decades, Chirac is groping for discretion and dignity as he beats a retreat over his Iraqi policy. He hopes some soothing words, a few concessions and a swing of fortune's pendulum will ease his international isolation and ward off US reprisals against his country. Chirac...

<p>PARIS - THE WAR NOW is past tense, the dead gone, the wounded paying the price for all the cheers and relief.</p> <p>The controversy resumes in the present and future tenses, over Washington's planned (or, as it seems, largely unplanned) pacification and reconstruction of Iraq as an economic and political society and over what may follow in the eastern Mediterranean.</p>

In 2002, well before the war in Iraq focused attention on Syria’s terrorist connections, Saddam sympathies, and military aid to the enemy, elements in the U.S. Congress were ready to unload sanctions on the Arab country. Now that stalled effort is back on track with new momentum spawned by a White House that is calling the Hezbollah- harboring country a “rogue nation.” Last year, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., introduced the Syria Accountability Act -- only to see it languish as the Bush administration reportedly worked behind the scenes to quash it as a distraction from Iraq and as inappropriate considering...

On the evening of April 9, the imam of an Amman mosque did not follow evening prayers with a special entreaty asking God to grant the Iraqi people victory against the Anglo-American invaders. The roar of the imams in Amman’s mosques fell silent. For three weeks, they had all been beseeching God, almost simultaneously. But by noon on April 9, as indications that Baghdad had fallen strengthened, Amman sank into dumbfounded disappointment. Like most other Arabs, Jordanians ­ irrespective of their position on Saddam Hussein ­ had wagered on a long Iraqi resistance that would exhaust the American and British...

This past Saturday at our regular meeting of the Arkansas FReepers, we were blessed with the opportunity to meet Jasmine, a young Kuwaiti woman and one time student of the University of Arkansas (I think...correct me if I'm wrong on that y'all). Travelgirl has been a foster mother to her and at Christmastime, much to the consternation and concern of her family and other FReepers, she flew to Kuwait to be present at Jasmine's wedding. At the meeting, we all listened attentively as Jasmine told her very moving story, driving home for us once again how blessed we are to...

<p>PARIS -An American backlash against French products and businesses has started to bite, dashing hopes here that appeals in the United States to punish France economically for opposing the war in Iraq would go unheeded.</p> <p>American importers of French wine are reporting sharp drops in sales in the past two months.</p>

Australia hits out at French and Germans over Iraq Australia has accused France and Germany of damaging the UN Security Council and splitting the European Union by refusing to back tough action against Iraq. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the rift between countries like France and Germany which opposed military action and others like Spain and Italy which supported it, had undermined EU unity and damaged its relations with the United States. "Several EU countries seemed prepared to abandon long-standing security partnerships with the US, doing great collateral damage to the Security Council in the process," Mr Downer said in...

Islamic militant Abdullah Azzam boasted to a crowd of American Muslims in 1988, "After [the defeat of the USSR in] Afghanistan, nothing is impossible for us anymore. There are no superpowers ... what matters is the willpower that springs from our religious belief." El Sayyid Nosair, the man charged with killing Rabbi Meir Kahane, wrote, "We have to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as the high buildings of which they are so proud." This is the thinking behind the creation of the...

The rift in Europe over Iraq reopened last night after America's friends began to assemble a stabilisation force to back coalition troops, but left out France. Asked about the plan at the European Union summit in Athens, Jacques Chirac, the French president, expressed surprise. "I do not know anything about this proposal," he said, adding that he did not think such a force would be "an essential part of the solution of the problem" in Iraq. He was speaking a day after he had a 20-minute conversation with President George W Bush to try to repair relations with Washington. Denmark's...

A clear-the-air telephone call between President Jacques Chirac and President George W Bush this week was secured only by repeated pleading from French diplomats, it emerged yesterday. The 20-minute call on Tuesday was the first time they had spoken for more than two months. When asked if the talk had been "positive", Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's spokesman, said: "From the President's point of view, he would call it a business-like conversation." M Chirac's spokesman said he had been "pragmatic" about post-war Iraq. Before the call could be arranged, Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to Washington, had to lobby Karl Rove,...

PARIS, April 16 (AFP) - French President Jacques Chirac and US President George W. Bush -- bitterly divided over the war in Iraq -- have broken the ice with a brief telephone call but mending their strained ties will take time, analysts said Wednesday. "The differences have not changed, of course, but they did well to try to avoid a widening of the gap," said Simon Serfaty, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Chirac wants to make sure that he is not left behind" when the postwar reconstruction of Iraq begins,...

From the moment that statue came reluctantly toppling down in Baghdad last week, the likes of me, who have always believed that this war in Iraq was both morally and practically right, have been told by those who opposed it to stop crowing. This is odd only in so far as I can't hear much crowing: rather the opposite. In the Commons, Tony Blair struck a note of downbeat calm and earnest intent, not Churchillian triumph, in his victory address. Even the Americans sound pretty restrained about the result and they are hardly a society given to understatement. Here is...

<p>WASHINGTON — One day after the capture of Abu Abbas, American officials began weighing Wednesday several options for handling the terrorist mastermind nabbed in Iraq.</p> <p>The three scenarios being discussed include holding him at a military base, transferring him to another country and bringing him to the United States for possible prosecution.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush had what the White House described as a "businesslike" phone conversation Tuesday with French President Jacques Chirac, the first time the two leaders have spoken since the beginning of war with Iraq, which France adamantly opposed.</p>

<p>April 15, 2003 -- Major combat in Iraq may have ended, but it might be a bit too soon to start bringing home the aircraft carriers.</p> <p>Why's that?</p> <p>In a word: Syria.</p> <p>To be sure, the Bush administration has gone to great pains to make clear that it does not envision military action against Damascus - that the solution, for now at least, lies in possible diplomatic or economic measures.</p>

<p>April 15, 2003 -- THE question on everybody's lips yesterday was: Is Syria next?</p> <p>The answer: Syria is indeed next: It will be the next Arab country to change radically.</p> <p>That doesn't mean American forces will march on Damascus, or that U.S. smart bombs will rain down on Syrian military positions near the Golan Heights - that is, unless Syria acts in ways that seriously endanger or cost the lives of coalition forces in Iraq.</p>

PARIS (Reuters) - France has threatened to deport any Muslim leaders preaching extremist views, after fundamentalist Muslims won a strong voice in a new council to represent Islam in France. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday the council, which will represent the country's five million Muslims, would not be allowed to become a breeding ground for radical Islam. "Islamic law will not apply anywhere because it is not the law of the French republic. Any Imams whose views run contrary to the values of the republic will be deported," Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio. "(The council gives us) more...