Paris, Feb 17: Post-war reconstruction in Iraq and trade issues are the main hurdles to an improvement in still-fragile relations between France and the United States, US Congress members said. Members of a recently-created ''French Caucus'' met President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to discuss issues still dividing Paris and Washington a year after their split over the war in Iraq. Republican Amo Houghton of New York, co-chairman of the Friendship Group, said the conversation with Chirac was frank but friendly. However, there was still some way to go to repair transatlantic relations after dramatic disagreements in 2003. He said that on a scale of one to five, with one the top rating, relations currently stood at three. ''And three is not good, it simply is not because we've got too much to do together to have a split,'' Houghton told a news conference. He said the members of the US House of Representatives told Chirac that Iraq and trade were areas of concern. ''The United States was disappointed, not in the fact that France objected to what we did in Iraq, but the fact that they tried to rally part of the world against what we did in Iraq,'' Houghton said. France last year mustered Germany and Russia to its side in opposing US plans to invade Iraq and threatened to veto any UN Security Council resolution Washington might seek to support a war. Democrat James Oberstar of Minnesota, the second co-chairman of the Friendship Group, said the issue now was whether US President George W Bush would include the international community in the reconstruction of Iraq via the United Nations. On trade, Houghton saw little chance of meeting a European Union deadline for the united states to repeal a system of tax breaks for exporters, known as foreign sales corporation, by March 01 or face 200 million in sanctions. ''Here we are trying to bring our two countries back together again and anything that destroys that relationship will be bad.'' French Deputy Axel Poniatowski, head of the Franco-American Friendship Group at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, said that although fundamental differences remained, the acrimonious tone was gone from the transatlantic debate. Bureau Report