France proclaimed its desire to help restore peace in Iraq after a visit yesterday to Baghdad by its Foreign Minister ended the four-year diplomatic freeze that followed the US-led invasion.

As Paris media hailed “The French return to Iraq”, Bernard Kouchner concluded his three-day trip with a pledge that under President Sarkozy, France would no longer sit on the sidelines saying “we told you so”.

The position had changed since President Chirac led an international coalition against the invasion, he said. “The world knows that the Americans cannot get this country out of its troubles all alone. The more the Iraqis seek the intervention of the United Nations, the more France will help them,” he added.

“What plays out here will shape the world,” he said, talking of the risk of spreading religious conflict. “We want to be at the side of this large and important country at the birth of its democracy.”

Dr Kouchner used his fact-finding visit, during which he met Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and Christian leaders, to press the Iraqis to save and rebuild their nation. President Talabani and Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, called for French public and private investment in reconstructing their country. Iraqi media said that President Sarkozy was organising an international conference on Iraq, but French officials would not confirm this.

The first high-level French visit to Baghdad since the invasion was welcomed by Washington, which saw it as a further gesture of cooperation from President Sarkozy. At home, though, the enthusiasm of Dr Kouchner and the President was not universal. Many in the French Establishment argue that France has nothing to gain by engaging in the “American quagmire” and that the intercommunity conflict there should be allowed to run its course. That view is dominant in Dr Kouchner’s own Foreign Ministry, according to French media.

Dr Kouchner, a maverick rights activist who led Western efforts to protect Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s and 90s, was also attacked by his own left-wing camp. “France is behaving like a poodle,” said Noël Mamère, a senior Green party politician. “What are we going to do with this mess?” he asked. “We are just going to get our hands dirty.” Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a former senior Socialist minister, recalled that Dr Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, was one of the rare French politicians who had supported the principle of intervention in Iraq and was now humiliating himself further.

In response Dr Kouchner recalled that Mr Chevènement had backed Saddam Hussein, “a butcher who killed 2 to 4 million of his own citizens”. He said that France was right to oppose the invasion, which had been entirely misconceived. The international community should have tackled Iraq as it did in Kosovo in 1999, suggested Dr Kouchner, who served as UN administrator in the Serbian region from 1999 to 2001. “The Americans committed mistake upon mistake in Iraq. Now it’s a case of turning the page,” he told Le Monde.

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