WASHINGTON: Just weeks after the angriest rift with a close ally in decades, the United States is quietly backing away from threats to penalize France for its strenuous efforts to block the US invasion of Iraq.

Although Secretary of State Colin L. Powell sent ripples across the Atlantic with his warning on April 23 that Paris would suffer “consequences,” serious steps to punish France are “not being taken seriously” in the Bush administration’s top ranks, a White House official said this week.

After a series of high-level meetings, the US has instead settled on a strategy of trying to outmanoeuvre France in global forums and, if that doesn’t work, going around the French to accomplish its goals with the help of other allies, as in Iraq.

“The goal is to give them an opportunity (to work with the United States) but not give them a stranglehold,” a senior Bush administration official said.

For example, US officials are trying to figure out ways to proceed with the reconstruction of Iraq if France, or Russia, blocks the lifting of UN sanctions and thus delays generation of Iraqi oil revenue. The two countries are reluctant to give the US control over Iraqi oil revenues and want the United Nations to play a stronger role in postwar Iraq.

The US announced this week that it would lift some of the sanctions that the first Bush administration imposed on Iraq in 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait.

To achieve desired results in Nato, the United States could seek action through the organization’s Defence Planning Committee, to which France does not belong, rather than trying to forge consensus within the alliance’s political body, the North Atlantic Council.

Powell, signalling an effort to bury the hatchet and renew cooperation on the Security Council, said on Wednesday at the UN: “Whatever happened in the past is in the past.”

The new, pragmatic attitude stems from the need to avoid damaging the many areas where the US and France cooperate well, such as trade and investment, counterterrorism, and peacekeeping in the Balkans.

Economic cooperation is crucial to Bush and Chirac, because each is grappling with a troubled economy that could spell political turmoil. —Dawn/ LAT-WP News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun