Part of Saddam Hussein's strategy for survival was to be very generous to those countries that showed little interest in toppling his regime. In 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency compiled a report that concluded that Iraq handed out significantly more contracts under the oil-for-food program to countries that called for a loosening of sanctions against Iraq than to those who advocated strong sanctions. "Over the life of the program, Baghdad has awarded one-third of the contracts to France, Russia and China," the CIA said in the secret document, according to a New York Times report at the time. After the Gulf War, the United States -- which has long called for strong sanctions against Iraq and, even under President Clinton, made it clear that "regime change" is its goal -- did not do much business with Iraq.

Saddam's shrewdness paid off; whatever other calculations entered into their opposition to war, certainly some part of the French, Russian and Chinese position, just like the American position, had to do with a simple economics. In addition to contracts to provide a broad range of approved supplies under the oil-for-food program -- contracts estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars -- French and Russian firms had signed or negotiated many billion-dollar deals in Iraq's oil industry.

In 1997, Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, signed a huge oil deal with Saddam -- estimates on the size of the contract range from $3 billion to $20 billion -- to develop Iraq's West Qurna oil field. Sanctions prevented the company from working on the project, and as war drew near and it appeared that Lukoil might lose out, the company began pursuing American guarantees to keep its oil rights in Iraq after Saddam. Those moves prompted Saddam's fury, and in December, Iraq threw Lukoil off the contract and asked Russia to choose another firm to replace it. Now, many small Russian oil firms feel a sense of entitlement to the West Qurna field -- and there's also a worry, it seems, that the entitlement will go unfulfilled.

"The Americans haven't gone into this war intending to share with anyone. It's a war trophy," Nikolai Tokarev, the chief of Zarubezhneft, Russia's state oil company, told a Russian paper recently, according to wire-service translations. "We're clearly going to have to cut our losses on anything we have there and anything we could have had."

Russian officials are more optimistic about their chances in Iraq. "We are currently working on the immediate return of Russian firms, which have interests in Iraq, to the country as soon as peace is restored," Igor Yusufov, the country's energy minister, told the Russian press on Thursday. And Igor Ivanov, Russia's foreign minister, recently said in a speech that "We will have to defend our interests so that the contracts which were signed under Saddam Hussein are not annulled as lacking legal force and to make sure the Iraqi debt owed us is respected." Ivanov added that "Iraq does not need democracy brought on the wings of Tomahawks."

France has fewer existing oil contracts with Iraq, and French businesses seem less combative than the Russians about opportunities in postwar Iraq. Shortly after the war began, French President Jacques Chirac did threaten to veto any U.N. resolution that would "legitimize the military intervention" and "give the belligerents the powers to administer Iraq." But TotalFinaElf, a French company that is one of the world's largest oil firms, says that it is not gravely worried about who runs Iraq after the war -- the company thinks it will still have a part to play.

Paul Floren, a spokesman for the firm at its headquarters in Paris, said, "I think that the feeling out there is -- well, there are risks of what have you, of politics, but we're not a political company, we're a business. We try to stay out of politics, and we hope we're judged on the record of our company and the skill of our engineers." TotalFinaElf has a long history in Iraq; one of its first big oil finds, in 1927, was near Kirkuk, in the Kurdish northern region of Iraq, and it had major interests in the country until the late 1970s, Floren said. But although it's been widely reported that TotalFinaElf has signed major contracts with Saddam and could lose a great deal if his government falls, Floren said, "you can't believe everything you read." He concedes that "between 1991 and 1997 we had a country representative there who negotiated contracts," but he says that those contracts were never signed, and they're essentially dead.

Floren sought to quash the idea that his company would face any hardship at all in postwar Iraq. He said that major oil development there would only occur in several years' time, after a stable government had been in place -- so he didn't worry about being slighted by a short-term American regime. But more than that, Floren -- who speaks English without any hint of a French accent -- said there's nothing really intrinsically French about his company, which has thousands of employees stationed all over the world. "We're headquartered in France and historically we're a French company, but we're really a multinational, and you can tell from my accent that I'm hardly French myself," he said. "We're not any more French than Royal Dutch Shell is a company based in the Netherlands."

He added that if his company gets any work, all the money from such a deal would definitely not flow directly to Paris. "The way the oil industry is structured, it's rare that any major oil company works alone on any field. We always work in consortiums, we always are with our partners -- ExxonMobil, Shell, B.P., ConocoPhillips, Texaco ... Any field development will be spread out, and will be worth billions and billions and billions and billions."

A key unanswered question in determining whether French and Russian firms get a piece of postwar Iraq is how receptive the Iraqis are to the countries that tried to prevent war. Many pro-war Americans assume that, once Saddam falls, Iraqis will greet American soldiers with unabashed enthusiasm, and will perhaps want to oust European interests from their country.

"The French company Total has signed a $40 billion oil deal with the Iraqis. Paris is, therefore, anxious to preserve that. But many Iraqis say the contract is unfair and one-sided. They want it to be renegotiated in favor of Iraq," Richard Perle, one of the most passionate proponents of war in Iraq, said recently in an interview with the National Review. "But that is not an issue for us. It is the future Iraqi government that would decide what do with the country's oil and other resources. There is no reason why France, which has a long presence in Iraq, should be excluded from normal and mutually beneficial deals." On Thursday, amid questions of his own business interests in pushing for war, Perle suddenly announced that he was stepping down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential group of foreign-policy experts that advises the Pentagon.

At least so far in the war, though, there have been few scenes of freed Iraqis dancing in the streets. And if it does indeed turn out that Iraqis are less than pleased with their American "liberators," will they not feel some satisfaction in making it very difficult for American business in Iraq?

"I don't see how American executives can work when their lives will be at risk," one French Finance Ministry official recently told Reuters. "There will be such hatred toward Americans."

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