Eleven thousand Commonwealth citizens who died during the First World War are buried at a cemetery in Pas-de-Calais, in France. As the war in Iraq began, graffiti began to appear in this cemetery, expressing such sentiments as 'Dig up your Rubbish, it is Contaminating our Soil' and 'Saddam will Win and Make Your Blood Flow'.

There was such outrage in Britain that French president Jacques Chirac felt obliged to send a note of apology to the Queen.

It has not been the only example of Frenchmen responding to the coalition attack on Iraq by behaving badly.

M. Dominique de Villepin, the diplomat who is the pin-up boy of "progressive" European liberals, reportedly told the French National Assembly that hawks in the American administration were little more than pawns of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He attacked a pro-Zionist American administration lobby that he said was made up of Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, White House staffer Elliot Abrams and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, all of whom are Jewish.

Even Bermuda's own Human Rights Commission might have difficulty with such unpleasant remarks. Maybe. But they are not unusual in France, where, surprise, surprise, there has been a big increase in violent racial attacks recently, most of them against Jews. Late in March, several Jewish teenagers attending an anti-Iraq war demonstration were set upon and beaten by a crowd, at least one of them with an iron bar.

If it sounds strange to you that that sort of thing could happen in a nation that has such high principles about international violence, you may be ready to consider another possibility - France's opposition to the war in Iraq has a great deal more to do with money than principle. And the position the country is taking on the involvement of the UN in the reconstruction of Iraq also has a great deal more to do with money than it does with principle.

France has major commercial interests in Iraq. More than a fifth of all Iraqi imports were from France immediately before the war. France had become Iraq's top European trading partner, displacing Russia. Nearly 60 percent of French companies had business ties with Iraq, ties that helped them pull in something like $1.5 billion annually.

France ranks as Iraq's third largest trading partner under the UN's Oil-for-Food programme, raking in $3.1 billion since 1996. (Russia is number one, incidentally, with $4.3 billion.)

Before the war, the French oil company Total Fina Elf had options to explore an estimated 15 percent of Iraq's oil supply reserves. It spent six years in the 1990s doing preparatory work on two giant oil fields.

Saddam Hussein and M. Chirac are old friends. M Chirac started the "golden age" of French-Iraqi relations by visiting Baghdad, and other Arab countries, in 1975. He signed contracts worth billions of dollars with various Arab states, including one that launched Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme by giving Iraq its first nuclear centre, Osirak. The Israelis had the good sense to bomb Osirak out of existence in 1981, the moment their intelligence confirmed the Iraqis were working to build a nuclear bomb there. It was a prospect that did not seem to have bothered M. Chirac much at all. At the time, he became known as "Jacques Osirak" because of his involvement.

There has been a substantial personal friendship between the two leaders. M.Chirac's tactics at the UN this year, obviously designed to prevent or at least delay for as long as possible Saddam Hussein's overthrow, sparked Uday Hussein to give him the title "Great Combatant" in his newspaper, Babel.

France is not the only nation that was a substantial trading partner of Iraq's before the war. Russia and China each control 5.8 percent of Iraqi imports. Germany is believed to have $1.35 billion in annual trade with Iraq, directly or indirectly.

Intelligence agencies believe France and Germany provided Iraq's military establishment with dual-use equipment under the guise of rebuilding the country's technological and industrial base. Germany agreed last November to supply trucks and spare parts worth $80 million. France's Renault SA at the same time agreed to provide $75 million-worth of "farm equipment".

Other economic deals between these nations and Iraq openly involved military hardware. France, Russia and China were responsible for supplying Iraq with more than 80 percent of its weapons arsenal between 1981 and 2001. Some analysts believe that France, China and Syria continued illicit weapons shipments to the Iraqis after 2001. Syria is accused of smuggling Iraqi oil and hiding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on Syrian soil. A German company has been accused to selling weapons to Iraq through Jordan. Russian arms dealers were accused of selling Global Positioning Satellite-blocking technology to Iraq as the invasion began at the end of March.

Russia is France's rival for the Iraqi oil reserves, having signed a $4 billion contract with Saddam Hussein's government not many months before the coalition invaded.

So, far from acting out of high principle, the likelihood is that attempts to stop the Iraq invasion had to do with protection of trade, and that now, what consumes these nations is how to win back the trade that has been lost.

Russia, through its Energy Minister, announced a few days ago that it would "insist" its contracts with Baghdad be honoured after the war. How much chance that policy has of succeeding remains to be seen, but none at all sounds about right to me.

France seems to believe that its best chance lies in putting pressure on the US to let reconstruction be handled by the UN, where it has influence and allies.

It is not yet clear exactly how reconstruction is going to be handled by the coalition partners. Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair have talked about a "vital" role for the United Nations, but are known to be anxious to avoid a situation in which other nations can delay and meddle with reconstruction and dictate where reconstruction contracts are assigned. It seems likely that the coalition's definition of "vital" will fall well short of the French, German and Russian definition.

None of the players in this little drama, including those in the coalition, has hands that are completely clean, especially from an historical perspective. Imperialism, oil and the Cold War have churned up some pretty murky behaviour all around. But since the coalition countries took the risks involved in sorting Iraq out, it does seem fair that firms in those nations should be given first crack at reconstruction contracts. It seems silly to expect that the very countries that gave the coalition such difficulty at the United Nations should be able to participate in a particularly significant way.

Yet France, Germany and Russia seem to be determined that they should. Hours after Messrs Bush and Blair talked at their summit last week about the UN's vital role, M Chirac announced that he thought it should be up to the UN alone to conduct the reconstruction effort.

Late last week, Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder persuaded Japan to join him in calling for control of reconstruction to be handed over to the UN. Germany, he said, would only participate if the UN was in charge.

The three anti-invasion nations, known by some as the Axis of Weasels, were meeting in Russia over the weekend to discuss strategy. Kofi Annan, who is not crazy, has declined to attend.

The three countries may have some difficulty with their plan. Andrei Zagorsky is deputy director of Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies, which conducts policy-related research at the international level, concentrating primarily on countries undergoing substantial structural changes and nation building. He says France, Russia, and Germany may be able to influence decisions on Iraq, but only if they work towards finding compromise, which is hardly what they want to hear.

"In my opinion, the meeting between Schroeder, Chirac, and Putin could have principal significance if the three states - the three leaders - agree on the key positions on which it would be possible to begin the process of moving together between Germany, Russia, and France, on one hand, and Great Britain and the US, on the other, on today's main question - defining the UN's role in the future of Iraq's rule."

Mr. Zagorsky says the UN is in a poor position to run an interim administration, and with Anglo-American forces already on the ground, the international body is "too late" to clamour for the role.

"If the United States is ready to claim the responsibility, why not let it?" he asked.

Why not, indeed.

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