ONCE A WEASEL...

President Jacques Chirac derailed an effort by Tony Blair to mend divisions between Europe and the United States over Iraq by insisting on an "immediate transfer" of power to the Iraqi governing council.

After talks in Berlin with Mr Blair and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Mr Chirac said an attempt to agree a formula for increasing the United Nations role had failed after disagreements over how and when the transfer of power should take place.

So - what is behind all this? Well, Tom Friedman at the NYT has this to say:

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq....

But then France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world, which is why its pose as the new protector of Iraqi representative government — after being so content with Saddam's one-man rule — is so patently cynical.

To which Sylvain Galvineau remarks:

France wants to get back to business as usual. For TotalFinaElf, Alcatel and the scores of French companies who coined money working for the Hussein regime for decades. As long as Paul Bremer is in charge, it won't happen. France needs someone it can bribe and sign dodgy deals with. The UN can deliver that. The US won't.