PARIS: France is facing US economic, military, and diplomatic sanctions as punishment for its opposition to the war in Iraq, according to official sources.

The US government has downgraded its participation at Salon de l’Aironautique, the French air show next month. The US government has also excluded France, officially its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) ally, from military exercises due later this year.

French military representatives have been barred from meetings in California on links between Galileo, the European satellite programme, and the Global Positioning System, which is the US military scheme of satellite identification, and which also serves NATO.

These measures were decided late April as a part of a campaign to punish France for its opposition to the US war against Iraq, officials say.

“This anti-French campaign includes a disinformation campaign in which anonymous government officials in Washington spread lies about France,” an official said.

French ambassador in Washington Jean-David Levitte denounced this disinformation campaign in a letter to US President George W. Bush. Levitte accused publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek and The Washington Post of joining the campaign.

“I would like to invite your attention to the disturbing, unacceptable nature of this disinformation campaign, whose aim is to hurt France’s image and to deceive the public,” Levitte said.

The disinformation has included false claims that France gave former Iraqi officials diplomatic passports, and that it had recently delivered components for chemical weapons to Saddam’s regime.

The official campaign in the US is being backed by a new business war. US companies like Boeing and the oil giant Exxon have launched a drive to push French competitors out of the market.

Exxon and Boeing recently won contracts in Qatar that had been sought also by their European rivals Total and Airbus. The US universities Princeton and Cornell have won contracts to develop university campuses in Qatar capital Doha against French competition.

French President Jacques Chirac sought to counter US influence at a meeting with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani in Paris earlier this month.

Chirac’s meeting with the Arab leader followed a visit to Qatar by French state secretary for small and middle-sized enterprises Renaud Dutreil in early May. Dutreil was accompanied by representatives of leading French enterprises operating in the Middle East.

Claude de Kimoularia, former French ambassador to Qatar, said in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde, that “the governments of the region have sympathy for the French diplomatic position, but they recognise that France has no real power to put its position through.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.