[This might be one way to reconcile the impression that France was originally willing to go along with this war and what finally ended up happening.]
Financial Times March 27, 2003
Just when did the President decide to go to war? by Stephen Fidler
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As time passes, the decision to have looked for a second United Nations Security Council resolution to back the use of force in Iraq looks worse and worse. US officials have already made plain that Washington's decision to seek the second resolution was taken for one reason only: because Tony Blair said he needed it.
[MP: This is their revisionist view, IMHO. I think the overdetermining factor at the time (August/early September) was because Bush's polls were plummeting; in part because criticism from Republican establishment figures was getting quite hot; and the Bushits felt that in order to win the midterm elections they had to reassure Americans that they were careful statesmen and not the nutjobs they appeared to be. And it worked. If they later paid for that lie, it is only just. If they hadn't made it, they would have likely lost their mandate in November, which would have caused a different set of problems.]
Hardliners in the Bush administration opposed the decision and chafed at it afterwards, arguing that it was not legally necessary. It now emerges that, in this respect at least, they had allies in an unexpected quarter: Paris. Not only that, France's ambassador to Washington, Jean-David Levitte, urged the US not to go forward with the second resolution.
"Weeks before it was tabled, I went to the State department and to the White House to say: 'Don't do it,'" he told a crowded meeting organised in Washington by the Council on Foreign Relations. He gave two reasons: "You will split the council and you don't need it."