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Eric Cabanis/Agence France-Presse

France's main labor unions rallied last month against the constitution in Toulouse.

LETTER FROM EUROPE
The Continental Dream: Will the French Shatter It?
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS, April 12 - Historically, the French have liked the idea of a united Europe as long as they could run it.

France, after all, was a founding member of the six-country European Coal and Steel Community, which was the precursor to today's 25-country union.

But in a brutal shock to the European experiment, 11 opinion polls in France in the last month have indicated that the French are poised to vote no in the national referendum on May 29 on Europe's first constitution.

The margins may be small, but each poll has been a dagger into the heart of the French political elite. The constitution must be ratified by every member state to take effect, and if a member with the grandeur and gravitas of France votes no, the document will be doomed.

So with few exceptions, French politicians on both the right and the left have predicted dire consequences for both France and Europe if that happens.

"We would likely be completely isolated," President Jacques Chirac said last month. Rejection of the constitution would threaten France's ability to protect its national interests; nothing less than "peace, stability, democracy, human rights and economic development and social progress in the world of tomorrow" is at stake, he added.

The mood in the country is reminiscent of 1992, when the French voted on the European Union treaty that committed members to creating a single currency. Predictions of a no vote provoked such a powerful wave of currency trading throughout Europe that the Continent's monetary system almost collapsed.

In the end, the French approved what was known as the Maastricht Treaty by a razor-thin margin. But surveys of voters leaving the polls revealed deep fears about the loss of French sovereignty to a European super-state.

This time, the loss of sovereignty is one of several reasons for resistance, even though the constitution itself is by no means a revolutionary document, since it will not cede ground in the two areas where sovereignty is most crucial: foreign and defense policy.

Rather, it will consolidate past European Union treaties into a single document. It will also change the union's voting system, removing, for example, national vetoes from some policy areas, like immigration, and streamline the union's administrative leadership. But as France's role as the dominant power of Europe has shrunk - first with the unification of Germany, most recently with the expansion eastward of the union to add 10 new members last year - France has become more anti-European.

"The French believe that their system is the best and that they are the center of the universe," Bernard Kouchner, the Socialist former health minister and one of the most popular political figures in France, said in a telephone interview. "It's not true. They don't realize they are like an old ship sinking slowly in the sea."

The constitution has been transformed into a repository of all the fears of the French today.

Some are convinced that the constitution will unfairly strengthen the power of the new countries of the union. Nearly 70 percent of farmers are opposed, for example, according to a poll in mid-March, because they see the European Union taking away precious farm subsidies.

Others fear that accepting the document will further damage the ailing French economy and increase unemployment - 10 percent in January - by moving jobs to places like Poland.

"For the past 25 years unemployment has been the French public's foremost concern and their prime voting motivation," said a recent editorial in the left-leaning newspaper Libération, in explaining mounting opposition to the vote.

Others want to use the referendum to register general opposition to the French government. But even François Hollande, head of the Socialist Party and a potential presidential candidate in 2007, asked voters at a rally in Marseille last month to set aside politics and vote yes for the good of the country.

Addressing "all those who are suffering" from the policies of the Chirac government, he said: "You want to punish, you want to express your anger, you want to register your discontent and you are right. But do not make Europe the sacrificial lamb when the government is to blame. Europe deserves better."

Then there is the group of 95 mayors of towns in Haute-Saône, in eastern France, who have threatened to refuse to hold the elections in their towns. They are protesting the latest decision by the Ministry of Education to close some schools to reflect demographic changes.

Concern about the referendum was widely seen as the reason the Chirac government decided to raise the salaries of unionized civil servants by eight-tenths of 1 percent last month.

The move was seen as a display of solidarity with the government workers and a transparent ploy to get them vote yes next month. Just a month ago, civil servants had been told there was no money for raises.

The newspaper Le Monde ran a cartoon on its front page last month showing Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin handing out 100-euro bills to civil servants as Mr. Chirac, a European Union flag attached to his head, handed them yes ballots.

"Nobody can say whether this strategy of palm-greasing will result in an electoral victory on May 29," said an editorial in Le Monde a few days later, adding, "We often wonder if there is still a pilot in the governmental plane."

The government, meanwhile, has mounted a vast, but haphazard, campaign to sell the constitution.

One million copies of it have been made available free in the 6,000 stores of the Casino supermarket chain, two million more in 14,000 of the country's post offices. There is a Web site and a phone number for those who want free copies sent to them. A children's book, "Explain the European Constitution to Me," with a preface by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former president, is being distributed at schools. Mr. Chirac will debate a group of 80 handpicked university students on live television on Thursday.

But so far the French elite has failed to explain what the constitution will do for the average French citizen. This is a country where lobbying has not yet been elevated to a fine art. There is no "war room," as there was when the Clinton administration lobbied Americans to embrace the idea of NATO expansion, no bipartisan observer group of lawmakers, no pinpointing of interest groups.

"Allow a simple mother to give you some common sense advice," the editor of Elle Magazine, Michele Fitoussi, wrote in an editorial. "For us 'no' is completely part of the national culture. It's a sport and a hobby. Small kids learn it from the cradle."

She said politicians should deal with voters the way good parents deal with their children: "Talk to us. Explain it to us. And make yourself clear and convincing."

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Paul Buck/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday, after their talks at the president's ranch
Sharon Asks U.S. to Pressure Iran to Give Up Its Nuclear Program
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, April 12 - Spreading photographs of Iranian nuclear sites over a lunch table at the Bush ranch in Texas on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel urged President Bush to step up pressure on Iran to give up all elements of its nuclear program, according to senior American and Israeli officials.

Mr. Sharon said Israeli intelligence showed Iran was near "a point of no return" in learning how to develop a weapon, the officials said. However, Mr. Sharon gave no indication that Israel was preparing to act alone to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, a prospect that Vice President Dick Cheney, who was at the lunch, raised publicly three months ago.

In a conversation lasting more than an hour, Mr. Sharon argued that European nations negotiating with Iran were softening their position and may be willing to allow it to hold on to technology to enrich uranium.

American officials said the evidence Mr. Sharon presented, including aerial photographs of sites in Iran, was neither startling nor new to Mr. Bush. But they said the prime minister was clearly pressuring Mr. Bush not to allow the European negotiations with Iran to drag on.

"The Israelis consider the Iranians a big threat and they saw this as another opportunity to convey that to the president," an American official said. But among American experts familiar with the latest Israeli imagery, the official added, "no one thinks this was earth-shattering stuff."

Israeli officials declined to describe the evidence they presented, or say whether the photographs were from Israeli or American sources, commercial satellites, or from agents on the ground in Iran.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sharon's extended conversation - bolstered by the Israeli photographs and intelligence presented by his chief military aide, Brig. Gen. Yaakov Galant - showed tension between Israel and its biggest ally over how much time is available to deal with the issue.

While American and Israeli officials insisted Tuesday that they were in total agreement about the nature of the Iranian threat, Israel has interpreted the evidence that the two countries share in what one official called "the worst-case scenario." In describing the Iranians as on the cusp of a "point of no return," officials said, Mr. Sharon was arguing to Mr. Bush that once Iran solves some remaining technical hurdles, there will be no effective way of stopping it from ultimately building a weapon - even if that day is years away.

"This can't be delayed much longer," a senior Israeli official traveling in Mr. Sharon's party said Tuesday. "There is very little time until the point of no return is reached."

American officials have interpreted the evidence differently. While they have accused Iran of running a secret weapons program - under the cover of plans to build nuclear power plants for electricity - they have told Congress that any weapon is likely to be several years away. In the most recent public testimony on the subject, on Feb. 16, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that "unless constrained by a nuclear nonproliferation agreement, Tehran probably will have the ability to produce nuclear weapons early in the next decade."

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in February in the German magazine Der Spiegel that if Iran had "decided to operate a secret nuclear weapons program - for which we, as I mentioned, have not found any evidence to date - they are likely to have a bomb in two to three years. They certainly have the know-how and the industrial infrastructure."

The White House said Monday that the subject of Iran came up over lunch, but it made no mention of the intelligence that was presented, and gave no details of the conversation. Israeli radio and other news reports in Israel gave more details earlier Tuesday, prompting American and Israeli officials to speak about the interchanges more openly.

The subtext of the conversation is an increasing concern within the administration that Israel might act pre-emptively, as it did in 1981 when it attacked Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak.

While American officials have rarely discussed that possibility openly, Mr. Cheney talked about it in an interview on MSNBC on Inauguration Day. "If, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had a significant nuclear capability," he said, "given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."

Mr. Sharon made no such threat at the lunch, officials said, and a senior Israeli official said Tuesday in Washington that "it is not Israel's job to lead this effort." The official warned that "what is worrisome is that there are several European countries that are beginning to think that Iran will be a member of the club, and that is a grave danger."

Mr. Sharon, officials said, made it clear to administration officials during his visit that he has little confidence in the outcome of the negotiations under way by Iran and three European nations - Britain, France and Germany. Iran has insisted that it has the right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and will not give up that right. While there is disagreement among the Europeans themselves, they seem more willing to allow some uranium enrichment, under strict monitoring.

The United States has argued that because Iran hid so many elements of its nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency for 17 years, it cannot be trusted.

"If you think that they've been running a secret weapons program, which is what we believe and the Israelis believe, than what kind of inspection system could work?" a senior American diplomat said Tuesday.

The session at the ranch also included some references to Iran's growing missile program, which gives it the ability to reach Israel. Admiral Jacoby, in his February testimony, noted that Iran already has medium-range missiles "capable of reaching Tel Aviv," and he said that by 2015, it may have "the technical capability" to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile. But he noted that "it is not clear whether Iran has decided to field such a missile."

Recently the new president of the Ukraine, Viktor A. Yushchenko, said his government had discovered evidence that the country's previous leadership secretly sold to Iran and China cruise missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead. Iran has denied it made any such purchases.


David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Steven Erlanger from Israel.



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Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters

ATTENTION EDITORS - VISUALS OF COVERAGE OF SCENES OF INJURY OR DEATH A man comforts two children who were injured by a suicide car bomb explosion in Baghdad April 14, 2005. At least 11 people were killed in twin suicide bomb blasts near an Interior Ministry building in central Baghdad on Thursday, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

At Least 19 Killed in String of Suicide Attacks Across Iraq
By ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 14 -- Insurgents launched a string of suicide attacks and armed assaults in central and northern Iraq today, leaving at least 19 Iraqis dead and scores wounded in the second straight day of renewed bloodshed here.

The attacks, coming a day after a kidnapped American contractor appeared in a videotape surrounded by masked gunmen, were the latest in a recent surge after the relative calm of the past two months. The range of the recent violence has echoed the darker days of the insurgency last year, and made clear that the extraordinary challenges facing the newly-elected government - which could assume power as soon as Sunday - have not subsided.

The worst attacks came in Baghdad, where two suicide bombers detonated their vehicles in quick succession near a police convoy as it passed an Interior Ministry building just before 10 a.m. The massive twin explosions, which had all the marks of a coordinated effort, left at least 14 people dead - all but one of them civilians - and 38 wounded, Interior Ministry officials said. Television footage taken in the wake of the incident showed cars reduced to blackened rubble and bloodied children being lifted into ambulances.

"It was a terrible scene of burning cars, body parts scattered all over the place, with blood puddles in the street and fire engines trying to put out the fires," said Hussein Sabah Jabur, one of the officers on the scene.

Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al Naqib, speaking on BBC Television, said he expected the elevated violence to continue over the next two weeks as the new government takes power. The insurgents, led mostly by hard-line Sunni Arabs, have made clear that they are enraged by the prospect of a government led by Shiites and Kurds.

Several other bombs exploded in the capital throughout the day, including a suicide bomber who detonated his car near an American patrol, but there were no immediate reports of other deaths or injuries. A police intelligence officer was shot to death by masked gunmen, in one of the assassinations that have become almost daily events here.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, four police officers were killed and three were wounded when insurgents surrounded a police station, firing a mortar into a crowd of officers and then raking them with machine gun fire, said Gen. Burhan Taib Saleh, the police chief of Kirkuk province. On Wednesday, nine police officers were killed in Kirkuk when a bomb exploded on a pipeline.

In Tikrit, a suicide bomber detonated his vehicle outside an American base, seriously injuring a United States soldier and two Iraqi soldiers, military officials said.

In northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border, American military officials continued a virtual siege of the city of Qaim, where suicide bombers drove three cars packed with explosives into an American base on Monday. After the attacks, American armored vehicles backed by helicopters blocked access to the city and fought a major battle with insurgents, killing about two dozen on Tuesday and Wednesday, Iraqi security officials in Qaim said.

The group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq -the terrorist network led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al Zarqawi - claimed responsibility for the twin car bombs in Baghdad in an Internet posting, and indicated that the Interior Ministry was the intended target.

The message also suggested that the attacks may have been motivated in part by the visit to Baghdad Wednesday of Robert Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state. The Internet posting referred mockingly to a "speaker of the Jews and Christians" who had made comments the day before about the Iraqi government's progress against the insurgency.

Another militant group, Ansar al Sunna, claimed responsibility for the Kirkuk attack in an Internet posting, and said it had carried out the previous day's attack in Kirkuk as a joint operation with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

American military officials have said they believed jihadist groups had begun collaborating, but this appeared to be the first time the groups said they worked together on an attack.

Fakhri al Qaisi, the leader of a hard-line Sunni group who says he has links with insurgent fighters, said in an interview today that one reason for the upsurge in attacks was the presence this week of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Zoellick in Baghdad.

But Mr. Qaisi said the attacks, which extended well beyond the capital, are also partly an outpouring of anger that has been bottled up over the past two months, as some Sunni rebels waited to see if their demands for a timetable for American withdrawal would be respected. Mr. Qaisi said he made efforts in recent weeks to open talks with American officials on behalf of the resistance, but was rebuffed.

The kidnapped American contractor, Jeff Ake, asked in the videotape released Wednesday that the United States government "open a dialogue" with the resistance, according to Al Jazeera, which broadcast it without audio. He also asked American officials to withdraw from Iraq, and to work to save his life, the station said.

The kidnappers did not identify themselves in the videotape. American embassy officials said today that they were working to secure Mr. Ake's release, but still had no information about who the kidnappers were.

In Baghdad, witnesses said the first suicide bomber detonated his vehicle at the front end of the police convoy, which was on its way to an oil refinery to collect fuel. The explosion sent up massive pillars of flame and smoke, and as the convoy came to a halt, gunfire rained down on it from several abandoned buildings nearby. Police officers ran from their cars, firing wildly, said Mr. Jabur, the officer.

Minutes later, the second car bomber surrounded by stopped traffic -- exploded at the rear end of the convoy, incinerating several cars full of civilians but killing only one police officer.


Layla Istifan and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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