Bush, Chirac smile for cameras at G-8

Presidents George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac smiled for the cameras on Sunday at the start of a Group of Eight summit overshadowed by the US...

Presidents George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac smiled for the cameras on Sunday at the start of a Group of Eight summit overshadowed by the US-French clash over the Iraq war and concern over Washington’s next moves. Bush got a short handshake and stiff smile from his loudest critic on arrival in Evian, the French spa on Lake Geneva hosting this year’s summit of leading industrial democracies. Chirac gave other leaders a much warmer welcome.

Both Bush and Chirac have said the Iraq dispute, in which France led Germany and Russia in opposing US invasion plans, was now history and both sides should look to the future.

Bush will meet Chirac on Monday morning but leave Evian that afternoon, a day before the G8 summit ends, making this what a local newspaper dubbed a ‘‘stopover summit’’ sandwiched in between other high-level meetings in Russia and West Asia.

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‘‘I can’t imagine they’ll meet without talking about Iraq,’’ Chirac spokeswoman Catherine Colonna said. ‘‘If they do it, it will not be to return to the past — that would hardly be useful — but to look to the future.’’

On the summit’s sidelines, a senior US official issued a veiled warning to Paris not to try to rally Europeans against Washington again, while Colonna stressed France sought a ‘‘multipolar world’’ with a key role for the United Nations.

Colonna did not rule out a summit discussion about the US Dollar’s recent sharp decline, an issue G8 leaders have been trying to play down, and said the meeting should send the world ‘‘a message of confidence on economic growth’’. Out beyond several heavily-guarded security rings, anarchists and anti-capitalists rampaged through towns in France and neighbouring Switzerland smashing shops and blocking roads to protest against the rich men’s club they say rules the world.

Thousands of demonstrators met for the main anti-G8 protest at the French-Swiss border South of Geneva, watched by a massive turnout of French and Swiss riot police.

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Protesters charge that the Group of Eight — the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia — is an elitist club that runs the world economy. Colonna said France thought Bush’s plan for a global pact to seize illegal shipments of weapons was worth studying, but asked who would do this and under what legal authority.

A British official said a summit declaration would brand terrorism and weapons of mass destruction ‘‘the pre-eminent threat to international security’’. In a veiled warning to Chirac, a senior US official on Bush’s plane said that terrorists hoped Western countries would continue squabbling rather than join to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

‘‘The forces out there that want to destabilise, that want to engage in terrorism (and) build weapons of mass destruction would like nothing better than to have the Western alliance… in an internecine battle about whose power needs to be checked,’’ the official said. Ways to revive the sluggish world economy will come up fordiscussion at Monday morning’s session, followed by a working lunch on issues such as West Asia and Iraq. (Reuters)