Blair seeks support from European allies

Diplomacy

CHINA RAGED, France again signalled its disapproval, Germany bit its tongue, and Tony Blair mounted a diplomatic offensive across Europe in order to shore up wavering support for the intensifying British and American air strikes against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

By last night no other country had followed Russia's dramatic example and withdrawn its ambassadors from London and Washington in protest at the attacks.

But in Europe, where limited demonstrations against the bombing took place outside United States embassies in Denmark and the Netherlands, the most telling reaction was the sheer lack of it.

Finding nothing good to say about the raids, the only alternative for most of America's traditional European allies was to say nothing.

Such, in effect, was the approach of the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, who declared tersely - and in defiance of the evidence - that he saw "no danger of a split" in the alliance over the attacks.

Pressed, he refused to elaborate on his statement on Thursday, that President Saddam had brought his latest troubles on himself by not co-operating with the United Nations weapons inspectors.

In a 1,000-word article for papers in several European countries, Mr Blair argued that London and Washington had acted as they had "to counter a real and present danger from a tyrant who has never hesitated to use whatever weapons come to hand".

He also spoke by phone with the leaders of France, Germany and Italy and with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

France, however, is plainly not convinced, and made clear yesterday both its unhappiness with the report by the chief UN inspector, Richard Butler, which triggered this week's strikes, and its view that the West had to define an entire new Iraq policy.

As the evening paper France-Soir demanded "Stop Him" in a banner front- page headline above a picture of President Bill Clinton, both President Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, warned the bombardment would solve nothing but merely increase the hardships of ordinary Iraqis. It also, they believe, risks increasing support for President Saddam throughout the Arab world - something that is already happening if demonstrations in several Arab capitals yesterday were anything to go by.

"The international community must find a global and long-term strategy to deal with Iraq," President Chirac's spokeswoman said, though officials in Paris readily admit there is no obvious one to hand. There is, by contrast, absolutely no doubt about the misgivings over the Butler report.

The Foreign Ministry declined to go as far as the newspaper Liberation, which quoted UN diplomats in support of charges that Mr Butler had deliberately slanted his findings against Iraq.

But, the Quai d'Orsay said, the report was "vague" and "raised many questions".

Another reason for the edginess of many European governments is the divisions aroused by the strikes within ruling left-of-centre governments.

Italy has already demanded a halt to the raids, and in both France and Germany the Communists and Greens take part in socialist and social-democrat- led coalitions.

With the French Greens and Communists demanding outright condemnation of the raids, Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, called them "inevitable but unnecessary".

Germany's Green Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, meanwhile underlined that the divisions which had already surfaced only heightened the need for a common European foreign policy.

Europe, he said, was embarking on a "very difficult discussion process - one, though he was too diplomatic to say so, that will have been made no easier by Britain once again throwing in its lot with the US, instantly and instinctively.

Its approach can only cast doubt on the sincerity of Mr Blair's recent call for a separate European defence identity, a concept embraced after some hesitation by Paris at the St Malo summit, but which already appears to have been honoured in the breach.