Defense Chief One of France’s Top Doves : Europe: He is under attack for restricting his nation’s role in the gulf to Kuwait. He has embarrassed Mitterrand and irritated Paris’ allies.

France’s defense minister, accused of restricting his nation’s military role in the Persian Gulf because of his own deep opposition to the war, is under increasing attack from political opponents and even prominent colleagues in the governing Socialist Party who want a clearer, broader French commitment to the allied war effort.

The controversy surrounding Defense Minster Jean-Pierre Chevenement has embarrassed President Francois Mitterrand, irritated American and British allies and threatened to disrupt the parliamentary consensus that backed French entry into the conflict. But it also opened the French government to the first serious domestic criticism of its handling of the war.

“In the area of defense,” former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing charged over the weekend, “we have neither concept nor objective.”

Former government minister and European Parliament President Simone Veil on Sunday compared Chevenement’s management of the French role in the gulf conflict to “a Shakespearean tragicomedy.” She said she was worried about the morale of French troops serving under a defense minister who is so clearly against the war.

France, with 12,000 troops and 52 fighter-bombers in Saudi Arabia, is the third most important Western military force in the gulf, behind the United States and Britain. But in what he says is a strict interpretation of the U.N. resolutions authorizing the use of force, Chevenement has attempted to limit French participation in the conflict to the territory of occupied Kuwait.

French aircraft, for example, did not participate in the initial bombing runs inside Iraq. On Thursday, Jan. 17, the morning of the first allied attacks on Baghdad and other cities, Chevenement held a press conference in Paris to emphasize that France would not fight inside Iraq. Further, he said the country’s military role was limited to missions in Kuwait by a protocol signed between France and the United States in the hours before the fighting began.

“There is no question of mounting who knows what kind of war of destruction against Iraq,” he said.

But not everyone agrees, not even among the supporters of the Socialist Party like tough-talking millionaire businessman and politician Bernard Tapie, a close political ally of Mitterrand. Said Tapie:

“France is at war. The war exists. We have soldiers there. Now, we need to win. If that means going into Iraq to destroy some bases, then we should do it.”

At least one critic accused Chevenement of conducting a policy that endangers French troops.

“If our allies had not struck at the heart of the Iraqi arsenal,” said Republican Party leader Gerard Longuet, “our soldiers would today be gravely threatened and the success of the offensive against Iraq gravely compromised.”

And Chevenement was almost immediately contradicted by the French military chief of staff, Gen. Maurice Schmitt, who said French missions inside Iraq are not “excluded,” and by Mitterrand himself.

Responding to what they said were certain “ambiguities” in the Chevenement statements, aides to Mitterrand at the Elysee Palace explained that the so-called “protocol” between the United States and France is actually a battle plan approved by all 29 nations in the military coalition mounted against Iraq.

Answering questions about Chevenement during a televised press conference Sunday night, Mitterrand said that although French aircraft have been assigned a role inside Kuwait in the allied battle plan, they are not “banned” from flying missions inside Iraq. Mitterrand suggested that French troops would likely have missions inside Iraqi territory once the ground war begins.

The controversy surrounding Chevenement dates to the beginning of the blockade of Iraq, when it was revealed in the muckraking weekly newspaper, Le Canard Enchaine, that he had been a founding member of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Assn., a powerful pro-Iraq lobby in France believed to have contributed millions of francs to selected political figures.

Since Aug. 2, when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, Chevenement has opposed escalation of the conflict at almost every stage. A report by the French news service Agence France-Presse that a “high French public official” had grave reservations about the war turned out to be Chevenement. On Jan. 10, a day after Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz failed to reach a peaceful solution at talks in Geneva, Chevenement called on the United States to make a “little gesture” to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

When a vote was taken in the National Assembly on Wednesday to authorize the use of French forces, four of Chevenement’s closest political allies voted against the motion. They were suspended from the Socialist Party for violating party discipline.

In one of the political ironies that occurs here and in few other democracies, France has been served by a minister of defense who is one of the leading doves in the government.

Critics, including many in the British press, contend that Chevenement’s policy is an attempt to appease Arab opinion by casting France in a less-aggressive, less-menacing role than its two main Western allies. Since the era of late President Charles de Gaulle, France has entertained close relations with many Arab states.

In the 20 years before the invasion of Kuwait, France was Iraq’s main Western trading partner. France was second only to the Soviet Union in sales of weapons to Hussein’s regime.

In fact, Chevenement’s policy was based first on the idea that the French public would not support a war led by the United States. Second, Chevenement and his followers hoped that once the war ended, the policy would put France in a favorable position with the Arab countries in order to dictate any post-war settlement.

But the defense minister, the leader of a leftist-nationalist faction of the Socialist Party, may have been wrong on both counts. First, the latest public opinion poll in France, conducted by the BVA polling agency for the Paris-based newspaper Liberation and published in a special edition Sunday, showed that 69% of the French approve of the military intervention of the United States and its allies.

Secondly, in the Arab countries, France appears to be receiving almost no credit for its independent policy. In the last several days, thousands of pro-Iraqi demonstrators have assembled in Algeria, the former French colony, to protest French participation in the war.