Iraq Spurned Last-Minute Bid by France

France’s last-minute attempt to launch a peace initiative in the Persian Gulf was a failure even before it was publicly announced because Iraq’s Saddam Hussein flatly refused to consider the proposal, U.S. and French officials said Tuesday.

The Bush Administration also rejected the French plan, which would have committed the U.N. Security Council to seek a Middle East peace conference “at the appropriate time” if Iraq withdrew its troops from Kuwait.

But even the French diplomats who had worked on the plan expressed no anger Tuesday toward the United States. Instead, they echoed Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who told the French Parliament that Iraq was to blame for the breakdown of diplomacy.

“The question is not . . . what response the United States made to this or that proposal,” Rocard said. “The fact, the only one that counts, is the painful evidence that Baghdad has resolutely refused all the offers of dialogue.”

By the time French diplomats unveiled the proposal Monday night at the United Nations, they already knew that it was “a non-starter,” one U.S. official said. As a result, some French sources acknowledged, the peace plan was more a gesture for the history books than a realistic initiative.

“We weren’t surprised when the United States opposed the resolution,” one French diplomat explained. “But we had to try it, so that we wouldn’t reproach ourselves afterwards.”

The French proposal called on Iraq to announce its intention to withdraw all its troops from Kuwait under a rapid, fixed timetable; pledged that the United States and other allied countries would not attack Iraq after the withdrawal, and committed the Security Council to seek a peace conference on all Middle Eastern issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. The plan said the peace talks would be held “at the appropriate time,” and only if it could be “properly structured”--wording identical to the Bush Administration’s own previous calls for such a conference.

U.S. and French officials sparred politely over whether that promise constituted “linkage” of a Middle East peace conference to an Iraqi withdrawal, something the Bush Administration has consistently rejected.

“This was not linkage,” protested Laurent Aublin, a spokesman for the French Embassy here. “We are not in favor of linkage either. We are in favor of a sequence of events, and we are in favor of an international conference.”

Some U.S. officials were annoyed at the French for raising the issue at the last minute, because it gave the impression that the Western alliance against Iraq was divided on the eve of war. A few complained privately that the French were trying to have the issue both ways--standing with the Bush Administration and its Arab critics at the same time.

“I cannot imagine that we would be that cynical,” Aublin replied. “It’s not our style.”

But the protests on both sides were muted--in large part, diplomats said, because the only way the French initiative could have worked was if Iraq had said yes.

As it was, French officials worked hard Tuesday to rejoin the West, declaring their readiness to fight side by side with U.S. troops.

“(French President Francois) Mitterrand has made it very clear: After the deadline passes, that’s war,” Aublin said. “And we are in the war.”