Iraq war was illegal, Chirac tells Bush

FRENCH President Jacques Chirac repeated his condemnation of the Iraq war yesterday and said a Group of Eight summit statement about weapons of mass destruction was not a green light for a similar attack on Iran.

Mr Chirac, whose active opposition to the Iraq war caused a transatlantic rift that overshadowed the three-day summit, said he reiterated his stand to US President George W Bush on Monday but agreed to work together to help reconstruct Iraq.

He rejected suggestions that a G8 summit statement pledging to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction hinted at a possible attack on Iran, whose nuclear research drive has prompted outside concern it might seek to build nuclear arms.

Both men clearly tried to put the Iraq dispute behind them during the annual economic summit, their first meeting since the war, even though Mr Chirac told Mr Bush he still considered the Iraq war illegal because it failed to win UN approval.

“We haven’t changed our view,” Mr Chirac said at a news conference winding up the meeting, held in France on the shores of Lake Geneva.

“The (UN) Security Council mostly followed us because it did not give a green light to the American action. I didn’t approve and I still don’t and I said this yesterday to President Bush,” he said.

Meanwhile, rock star Bob Geldof returned from starvation-hit Ethiopia yesterday and criticised the world leaders who attended the G8 summit for not doing enough to tackle the crisis.

Mr Geldof, 50, said he was disappointed with the progress made by the leaders of the world’s main industrialised nations towards alleviating poverty in Africa.

The campaigner said the summit was characterised by recriminations over the war in Iraq.

He said the politicians had done nothing to address the critical issues of trade and debt in Africa which, he said, were the root cause of the current crisis.