France Signals Wish for Iraq Role With Visit By Foreign Minister

Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, held talks yesterday with Iraqi leaders in the first visit by a French minister to Baghdad since Paris's opposition to the US-led invasion in 2003.

The highly symbolic three-day visit marked France's wish to forge a role in Iraq and build bridges with the US.

In 2003 Jacques Chirac's opposition to war was popular in France but led to icy relations with Washington. France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, nicknamed "Sarko l'Americain", has said France acted with arrogance in the run up to war, and is seeking to rebuild the relationship with the White House.

Although Mr Sarkozy deemed the Iraq war a mistake, he is keen to differentiate his foreign policy from Mr Chirac's, maintaining French diplomacy as a crucial motor in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, and playing a part in Iraq's future.

A week after Mr Sarkozy met George Bush for an informal picnic at his Maine estate, Mr Kouchner arrived unannounced in Baghdad on Sunday night for a visit welcomed by the White House.

"It is true that in the past we did not agree with certain countries about the events in 2003, but all that has been put behind us now," Mr Kouchner said after meeting Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani.

Mr Kouchner said France was "ready to play a role in the fight against the violence", but did not explain how.

Cautioning that he had no miracle answer to Iraq's problems, he said France would support UN involvement in ending sectarian violence. He stressed Mr Sarkozy's view that there could be "no military solution".

Mr Kouchner did not meet US officials and he described his meetings with Iraqi leaders as a "fact-finding mission". But he told reporters: "I'm not frightened of the prospect of talking to the Americans."

Asked about the timescale for a French role in Iraq, he replied "not today or tomorrow" but "one of these days". He said the US had made mistakes but insisted it was "now time to turn the page".

Mr Kouchner, co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning group Médecins sans Frontières, was one of the rare French public figures who did not condemn military intervention in Iraq in 2003, saying he was against war but also against Saddam Hussein. At the time, he criticized France for leaving the US and Britain with little choice but to go to war without UN backing. "If we had stayed at their side, we could have avoided war," he said in 2004, regretting that the French had become "America-haters".

Le Monde described Mr Kouchner's Baghdad trip as a spectacular gesture. The paper said he was right to go to Iraq, a country France could not ignore if it wanted to maintain a presence on the Middle East stage.