PARIS: Contrary to what many analysts and observers had predicted, French President Jacques Chirac has not caved in to pressure or blandishments from the United States to join an attack on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime.

On the contrary, he has dug in his heels and become the political symbol of global resistance to a US-led war against Iraq, a position that has earned him almost universal praise at home.

On Tuesday, the day after Chirac appeared on national television to say that France would veto a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a military operation against Iraq, even the notoriously anti-Chirac newspaper Liberation wrote admiringly: “This is his great work, one that will open the history books for him”.

To be remembered in French history books is certainly one of the motives driving the 70-year-old Chirac’s campaign for a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi crisis. But there are other reasons why he has chosen to draw a line in the sand against the administration of US President George W. Bush, perhaps alienating France’s most powerful ally for some time (to come).

Certainly, he is at least partly motivated by conviction. When he repeats his mantra that “war is the worst of all solutions and a sign of failure”, he probably means it.

However, a far more important conviction of his is the belief that the current unbalanced state of affairs, with a single superpower, represents a danger to global stability.

In a recent interview, he told Time magazine: “Any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions. That’s why I favour a multipolar world in which Europe obviously has its place.

“Anyway, the world will not be unipolar. Over the next 50 years, China will become a global power, and the world won’t be the same. So it’s time to start organizing.”

“Organizing” for Chirac apparently means creating a coalition weighty enough to create a counter-pole to the United States. Despite Washington’s claims to the contrary, Chirac is also sincere in wanting to strengthen the United Nations, so that major crises can be resolved collectively, rather than unilaterally.

This is one reason he has insisted that Iraq can only be disarmed by the UN Security Council. The other reason, of course, is that, with its veto in the Council, France remains a major global player, the equal of the US, Russia and China, as the Iraqi crisis has shown.

The French president also believes attacking Iraq is simply bad strategy. In his interview with Time, he spelled out why.

“A war of this kind cannot help give a big lift to terrorism,” he said. “It would create a large number of little Osama bin Ladens.”

Of course, not all the reasons for Chirac’s position are altruistic. In addition to his place in the French history books, he also has an eye on maintaining the country’s traditional close relationship with the Arab world.

Former Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said that Chirac “remains close to the Third World through ties of personal friendship. He is one of the rare current heads of state to know the five or six people who count in some 100 countries”.

This is true, above all, in the Arab states. According to the daily Liberation, Chirac speaks at least once a week with the heads of state of Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco.

At one point, that might also have been true of Saddam Hussein, whom Chirac once considered a friend. But that apparently ended in 1998, after the Iraqi leader rejected a last-minute compromise Chirac had negotiated with him to keep UN weapons inspectors in Iraq.

Furious and disappointed, the French president has since kept his distance from Saddam.

Finally, Chirac obviously represents French business interests, which maintained close and profitable ties with Baghdad for some two decades.

According to statistics furnished by the International Monetary Fund, France was the world’s largest importer to Iraq in 2001, providing Baghdad with some 650 million dollars worth of goods and services, or 13 per cent of Iraq’s total imports.

In the first eight months of last year, France’s exports to Iraq slipped to 298 million dollars, fourth worldwide behind Australia, Jordan and China.

It seems unlikely that if Saddam Hussein is toppled by a US-led military operation, France would maintain its privileged business relationship with Iraq.

However, Chirac must certainly be counting on using his new-found status in the Arab world to more than compensate for business lost in the pursuit of peace.—dpa