Saddam Hussein's French Kiss
GEDMIN, JEFFREY
Saddam Hussein's French Kiss A desire to stick it to the U.S. has led Paris to embrace the Iraqi dictator. BY JEFFREY GEDMIN WHEN RICHARD BUTLER once shared with the United Nations Security...
...ambassador Alain Dejammet mocked the evidence...
...According to the resolution, Iraq gives up its weapons of mass destruction...
...Dejam-met speculated that perhaps it was just "a truckers' picnic...
...The French also are interested in building coalitions against American power and influence ("the entire policy of France is dedicated to this" goal, says its foreign minister...
...Saddam's weapons programs continue...
...In August, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez became the first foreign head of state to visit Iraq since the Gulf War...
...The purpose...
...Straightforward...
...Baghdad has openly promised preference to those who help end the embargo...
...We are happy without the inspections," says Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz...
...More recently, the Russians, a strong competitor to France in representing Saddam's interest at the Security Council, have joined the French in testing the U.N...
...But this, too, flew in the face of all evidence...
...He smuggles in Mercedes and Volvos, "absolutely obscene amounts of Scotch," according to Western intelligence sources, and various other luxury goods for personal consumption...
...Even "son-of-UNSCOM," the softer, more politicized version known as UNMOVIC (the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission), run by former Swedish foreign minister Hans Blix, has not been allowed in...
...To bring to an end American "genocide," says Jean-Marie Benjamin, a priest who helped organize one of the recent anti-sanctions flights, backed by the French government...
...No doubt...
...The U.S...
...Chavez belittled those who would demonize Saddam ("We're all sons of God," he crowed...
...In another, Tariq Aziz, brazen and defiant, told UNSCOM's chairman Butler that the regime needed to retain its weapons of mass destruction for the Persians (Iranians) and the Jews (Israelis...
...For five years he refused to participate in the U.N.'s "oil-for-food" program, through which Baghdad is able to sell oil for food and medicine...
...Finally, and most successfully, the French have followed Baghdad's propaganda that the U.S.-led sanctions, and not Saddam's regime, have become the primary problem...
...Yes, Butler, the center-left Australian diplomat who has spent his career in arms control and disarmament issues—often on the opposite side from the United States...
...Security Council adopted resolution 687...
...He was promoted to governor of Kuwait and subsequently minister of defense...
...The Iraqis practice the Big Lie...
...Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam's, had the assignment in the late 1980s of providing a "final solution" to Iraq's Kurdish problem...
...Paris also followed Saddam's line by discrediting the work of UNSCOM more generally, suggesting that the enterprise itself was a tool of the Americans...
...At first, this meant discrediting Richard Butler as an agent of the Americans...
...The international community...
...India and China have applauded the move...
...So what's the French posture...
...commission charged with removing Saddam HusJeffrey Gedmin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative...
...What's more, the highest percentage of Americans that ever served among UNSCOM's team of technical experts was 17 percent...
...Iraq's oil minister, General Amer Rashid, claims today that Iraq has been "in compliance with 687 since the end of 1991...
...France's interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, called Butler's comments "ridiculous" (Chevenement had resigned as defense minister over the Gulf War...
...On this, France has won allies...
...Sure, the French, like the Russians, are eager to snap up lucrative oil contracts...
...The French approach to helping Saddam has not been a very creative one, mind you...
...program—circulating on the black market in Lebanon...
...If they get this Iraqi regime out of jail, what reward do the French really expect to receive...
...A Frenchman served as the photo interpreter for U-2 imagery—until his government recalled him in 1997 because, according to one former UNSCOM official, his work led him to stray from Paris's overtly political line...
...But the French deserve special credit...
...Last month, the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo Wellcome discovered its Ventolin—a children's asthma medicine, which had been shipped to Iraq under a U.N...
...In exchange, the international community gives up its sanctions against Iraq...
...How many truckers' picnics would we find today if the international community were able to conduct inspections inside Iraq...
...He smuggles out what he can't use...
...Foreign minister Hubert Vedrine suggested that Butler was "over-stepping his prerogatives...
...Go figure...
...UNSCOM—the U.N...
...Still, when Butler told the New York Times in 1998 that Iraq possessed enough anthrax to "blow away Tel Aviv," Iraq beat the drum about U.S.-Zionist conspiracies—and the French kept pace...
...What's the solution...
...embargo by sending planes into Baghdad...
...Who is going to say anything...
...Al-Majid boasted in a May 1987 meet-ing—a transcript of which was in the archive that fell into the hands of Human Rights Watch in 1991—that he would "kill them all [the Kurds] with chemical weapons...
...Nor will France's tender embrace civilize the Iraqi dictator...
...approach is to inflict punishment," says Vedrine, "whereas our approach is to look for a solution...
...F— them...
...The head of the missile team was a Russian, as was the deputy head of the chemical weapons unit...
...Of course, give a weak American president his due...
...The Swiss and Italians are considering following suit...
...After all, it conducted "endless checks," complained Le Monde, led by a "preponderance" of Americans...
...The briefcase contained materials for testing biological warfare agents such as anthrax and botu-linim toxin...
...In one instance, one of UNSCOM's senior biological inspectors seized a briefcase from two Iraqi officers running out the back door of a laboratory...
...But "the enemy of my enemy" sort of logic was supposed to have died with the end of the Cold War...
...At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the U.N...
...While still operating in Iraq, UNSCOM found a consistent pattern of flagrant cheating and concealment by the Iraqis...
...The factory reportedly employs 250 engineers and is working on plans for missiles with a range of 3,000 miles, far longer that the missiles Iraq recently tested...
...Since coming to office in 1995, President Jacques Chirac has pursued doggedly a policy aimed at ending sanctions and returning Saddam's regime to the family of respected nations ("Iraq is not a defeated nation...
...American fecklessness breeds contempt, even among our allies...
...Removing sanctions from Saddam will not change the plight of the Iraqi people...
...UNSCOM's work was led by scientific experts...
...Since 1996, his loyalists have hoarded food and allowed medical supplies to rot in warehouses...
...BY JEFFREY GEDMIN WHEN RICHARD BUTLER once shared with the United Nations Security Council a series of high-altitude photographs of some 130 heavy Republican Guard trucks gathering at an isolated spot in the desert—they had just fled an inspection site as Butler and his arms inspection team were approaching—French U.N...
...Equally straightforward...
...It's stunning, the degree to which a misguided and deeply cynical policy run by Paris has managed over the last four years to rally much of the world against the United States—and in support of Saddam Hussein's tyran nical regime...
...Paris simply follows Baghdad...
...Al-Majid gassed civilians and ordered films to be made of his massacres and deportations...
...sein's weapons of mass destruction— has not been permitted by Baghdad to operate in Iraq since late 1998...
...French diplomats declare...
...According to recent German press reports, Germany's intelligence has located a new secret missile factory some 40 kilometers southwest of Baghdad...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 5
