Word: chirac
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...Mediterranean summit in July 2008 in Paris, and his high visibility in his current six-month stint as President of the European Council, stand in striking contrast to the leaden final years of François Mitterrand's second term, or to the two mandates of Jacques Chirac. From the Caucasus to Damascus, it seems, France is back...
...Bush Administration has long sought to isolate Syria in the hope of forcing greater cooperation with U.S. Middle East policy. And France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has sought to align French foreign policy far more closely with Washington's than his predecessor, President Jacques Chirac, had done. So why did Sarkozy show up in Damascus, Wednesday, as the first Western leader to visit Syria since 2005? Playing a diplomatic game that revives France's independent global standing even as it pursues some of the same goals...
...honored guest at France's Bastille Day celebration on July 14. Sarkozy had campaigned for the presidency on a promise of a move toward human-rights centered foreign policy, and the Syrian leader is hardly a poster boy for the liberty France celebrates on its national day. Indeed, Chirac, hardly an acolyte of the Bush Administration, had been every bit as vehement as Washington on the need to punish Syria over its alleged involvement in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. Chirac boycotted this year's Bastille Day events to protest at the Syrian leader's presence...
...Whereas Chirac had relied on Saudi Arabia as his primary Arab interlocutor, Sarkozy appears to have turned to Qatar as the key intermediary to re-establish contacts and prepare visits and exchanges between Paris and Damascus. Evidence of Qatar's mediating role is clear in the fact that the Gulf State will participate, along with Turkey, in a four-nation summit Thursday during the second day of Sarkozy's Syria visit...
...Syria of sponsoring terrorism, led an effort to isolate the country diplomatically and economically. And in a rare instance of Franco-American harmony, France had its own grudge against Syria: the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister and close friend of former French President Jacques Chirac, an act for which many in the West blamed Syria...