Published March 18th, 2007 by Future Atlas
Time’s up: French views on Iraq
As the war in Iraq begins its fourth year, it is worth revisiting some of the views of France, which was one of the more vocal skeptics in the runup to the US invasion.
In this Washington Post article from February 11, 2003, Jacques Beltran, a French foreign policy expert, suggested that French President Jacques Chirac “believes a war is extremely dangerous. There’s a risk of destabilizing Iraq and the whole region, as well as Israel.”
A French official noted that “We are not pacifists. But we honestly think it is a mistake to go to war … You will pay the price in terms of terrorism, in terms of the Arab world versus the Western world.”