Chirac, Schroeder Go on the Defensive (washingtonpost.com) Chirac and Schroeder's domestic critics are increasingly urging the leaders to accept the outcome in Iraq, partly to make it easier to get business deals in reconstructing the country.
Margarita Mathiopoulos, chairman of the foreign policy and security committee of Germany's opposition Free Democratic Party, said Schroeder should have taken advantage of the fall of Hussein to mend fences with President Bush.
"It was a great chance for the chancellor to be generous and say, 'Mr. President, congratulations, you did a great job,' and start to try to rebuild the relationship. But he didn't do that," Mathiopoulos said. The German newspaper Die Welt said the scenes from Baghdad recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The pictures will go down in history. They are reminiscent of 1989," it said. "The German government confronted every demand for an end to the dictatorship with a horror scenario. None of this happened."
In France, business leaders are worried that anti-French sentiment in the United States will cost them contracts. Sodexho Alliance, a large French catering group, said Wednesday that France's diplomatic position had kept it from obtaining lucrative deals to supply U.S. and British forces in the Gulf.
Special correspondents Caroline Huot in Paris, Shannon Smiley in Berlin and Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt and staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.
Margarita Mathiopoulos, chairman of the foreign policy and security committee of Germany's opposition Free Democratic Party, said Schroeder should have taken advantage of the fall of Hussein to mend fences with President Bush.
"It was a great chance for the chancellor to be generous and say, 'Mr. President, congratulations, you did a great job,' and start to try to rebuild the relationship. But he didn't do that," Mathiopoulos said. The German newspaper Die Welt said the scenes from Baghdad recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The pictures will go down in history. They are reminiscent of 1989," it said. "The German government confronted every demand for an end to the dictatorship with a horror scenario. None of this happened."
In France, business leaders are worried that anti-French sentiment in the United States will cost them contracts. Sodexho Alliance, a large French catering group, said Wednesday that France's diplomatic position had kept it from obtaining lucrative deals to supply U.S. and British forces in the Gulf.
Special correspondents Caroline Huot in Paris, Shannon Smiley in Berlin and Souad Mekhennet in Frankfurt and staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.
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