His office, the Salon Doré, was an opulent holdover from nineteenth-century France, its golden walls adorned with Gobelin tapestries that surrounded the most valuable antiques in all of the Élysée Palace. But on this day, the familiar grandeur barely registered with the French president as he waited for yet another phone call from Bush: the topic, again, would be Iraq. Just weeks after the first U.N. resolution demanding that Saddam comply with his disarmament obligations, the Bush administration was pushing the Security Council to take the next step, authorizing a U.N.-backed invasion. Chirac remained unconvinced that military action was necessary: he still considered the evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction to be flimsy at best. Rushing into battle based on hunches and theories struck him as the height of folly. Bush had been particularly unpersuasive in making the case, Chirac thought. Months before, the American president had leaned on him to support an authorization for military action as part of the first U.N.
