Despite insisting from the start that the war is illegal because unsanctioned by the United Nations, Chirac could not avoid hailing its outcome -- the collapse of a universally-reviled dictator -- and his statement sought to place France clearly on the side of the victors.

"France, like all democracies, is delighted at the fall of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and hopes for a quick and effective end to the fighting," Chirac's office quoted him as saying.

But the damage to France's relations with Washington is already so severe that gestures of this nature are unlikely to receive anything more than scorn on the other side of the Atlantic.

The US accuses France of giving succour to Saddam Hussein by blocking UN authorisation for its offensive; it was angry at Paris's refusal to say unequivocally that it wanted an allied victory; and it regards Chirac's ceaseless insistence on a "central" role for the UN as effrontery.

Relations are not so bad with the other major combattant -- Britain -- which largely shares France's desire for UN involvement in post-war Iraq, but there too it will be a long time before the contempt with which Chirac's name has been bandied about is forgotten.

For the few French opponents of their president's policy, Chirac's mistake was to manoeuver himself into a position which would be vindicated only if the US-British attack went badly. Allied victory -- and the long-awaited sight of cheering Iraqi crowds -- have left him embarrassed and sidelined.

"We have got to rein in the hardline policy of Chirac and (foreign minister) de Villepin," said Claude Goasguen, who is a member of the president's Union for Popular Majority (UMP) party.

"It is time for French diplomacy to moderate the violence of some of its remarks towards the Americans and to reconsider some of the staggering and uncontrolled statements it has made," he said.

Another senior UMP figure Jacques Barrot, who leads the party in the National Assembly, said: "Jacques Chirac has to acknowledge that the courage of the Americans and the British has brought to an end a dictatorship."

It is significant that virtually the only critics of Chirac have come from within his own centre-right constituency, while the opposition Socialists and Communists -- as well as the far-right National Front -- have universally applauded his resistance to the US.

France's policy now is to limit the diplomatic damage by building up ties with Britain, maintaining solidarity with the two other key "peace" camp nations -- Germany and Russia -- and trusting that its broader international stock has risen as a result of its insistence on UN legitimacy.

"The end of the Iraqi regime is a good thing and we welcome it," an unnamed adviser to Chirac told Liberation newspaper Thursday. "But what has happened in no way places in doubt our opposition to a unilateralist vision of the world, nor the absence of legitimacy in ths use of force in Iraq."

A foreign ministry official told the paper: "Liberating a people from dictatorship has nothing to with the occupation of a country by a foreign power."

Suspicion of the US, in other words, remains strong and feeds into Chirac's constantly-repeated message about the need for a UN take-over as soon as possible in Iraq.

The risk for Paris is that this new line proves as irritating to Washington as the old one, confirming in its eyes France's role as perennial spoiler and disqualifying it from any significant role in the post-war order.

SPACE.WIRE