Position of Lebanon in the 2006 Lebanon War had made comments on television saying that Israel should consider a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. On 13 July, a prominent Lebanese Druze member of parliament, Walid Jumblatt, criticized Hezbollah in an interview with the French daily "Le Figaro": "Hezbollah played a very dangerous game by kidnapping these two soldiers. ... Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon. These kidnappings took place outside our country's borders. Hezbollah is raising the stakes, with the support of Iran and Syria, which in the past year has become a satellite state of Tehran. … Hezbollah will have to explain itself to the Lebanese. ... [We need
French support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War Lebanon, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and having a nonaligned movement separate from the Western and Soviet camps, French and Iraqi policy differed. Baathist ideology was fundamentally anticommunist. Iraq and the Soviet Union did not always have common political goals. Iraq and France, however, also did not always have common interests, but France was quite liberal in not tying arms sales to Iraqi actions, or other instability in the region. For example, France continued to openly trade with Iraq even when Iranian-inspired terrorists took French hostages in Lebanon. Many countries provide a level of policy control, because private exporters need government approval.