French duplicity rules UN out of rebuilding Iraq - by William Rees-Mogg

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Einar Stefferud <Steflist () thor nma com>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 21:52:03 -0800


London Times - April 07, 2003

French duplicity rules UN out of rebuilding Iraq   -   by William Rees-Mogg


If you do not fight the war, you will not control the peace. When the war in
Iraq is over, the US Army will remain in control of the country, just as the
Allies were left in control of Germany in 1945. How long that period will
last will depend on the success of the reconstruction programme, which is
bound to be under American control.

Some people imagine that President Bush will turn to the United Nations,
which spent 12 years failing to disarm Iraq, from 1991 to 2003, and politely
ask it to take over responsibility for the reconstruction.

There are several objections to this proposal. As Bosnians have cause to
remember, the UN can take a pacifist view of peacemaking operations. If
nasty people shoot at the blue berets, they are sometimes too polite to
shoot back. In President Wilson's words, they are "too proud to fight".
After the end of this war, Iraq may well remain a dangerous place for some
time. It would be a mistake to replace the "overwhelming force" of the
United States with the underwhelming force of the United Nations.

Handing Iraq over to the UN would mean bringing back into high influence
Saddam Hussein's closest international allies, France and Russia, the two
countries which invested in the Saddam regime on the largest scale, supplied
him with weapons and lent him money. Both countries agreed to the
disarmament of Iraq under UN Resolution 1441, with its threat of "serious
consequences", then decided to veto the consequences when Iraq failed to
disarm. They did not cause the war, but they did make it inevitable.

Saddam has comprehensively ruined Iraq, leaving behind huge debts which have
been estimated at around £65 billion. This money was not spent on
development, or for the benefit of the people of Iraq, but on weapons for
the army, presidential palaces for the Saddam family and high living for the
regime, including its security apparatus of torturers and murderers.

France and Russia, which supplied the arms, are no doubt among those with
the largest holdings of Saddam's debt. If the United Nations were
responsible for reconstructing Iraq, France and Russia would be well placed
to protect their financial interests. Each has a permanent seat on the
Security Council; each has a veto. The American Administration would prefer
to spend the money on the redevelopment of Iraq rather than on meeting the
bills incurred by Saddam's weapons programme.

Russia might hope to be forgiven. The main Russian support for the Iraqi
regime goes back to the time of the Soviet Union, much of it even to the
days of Leonid Brezhnev. In those days the two totalitarian dictatorships
naturally made good friends for each other. But Brezhnev is long dead, as is
the Soviet Union, and the world is a cleaner place for it. In the case of
France, Saddam's leading sponsor over the years has been Jacques Chirac. He
is very much alive, and living in the Elysée.

If one asks whether the United States ought to hand over reconstruction to
the UN, one should first look at President Chirac's record over Iraq. One
should also remember the record of Saddam Hussein himself: the wars, the
massacres, the tortures, the megalomania, the grotesque self-indulgence, the
hostages, the poison gas, the attempt to build a nuclear arsenal. All of
these were well known to France. Such was the regime of which M Chirac was
the cynical sponsor for nearly 30 years. No one can defend M Chirac who is
not prepared to defend Saddam as well.

William Shawcross last night presented his film, (set italic) J'Accuse
Jacques (end italic), on Channel 4. He recounted how M Chirac, as Prime
Minister of France in 1975, greeted Saddam, then the Vice-President of Iraq.
At the banquet, he called Saddam "a personal friend and a great statesman".
M Chirac agreed to sell Iraq arms worth billions of pounds and a new
fast-breeder reactor. Saddam himself claimed that "the agreement with France
is the very first concrete step towards production of the Arab atomic bomb".
So it would have been if the Israelis, with admirable foresight, had not
bombed the reactor in 1981. Since that banquet France has sold something
like £13 billion of arms to Iraq. Those are the weapons the Americans have
had to destroy in two Gulf wars.

Between these two wars, France repeatedly intervened on Saddam's behalf in
the UN Security Council. These French interventions had the effect of
undermining the work of the inspectors of that time. France's reward was to
become the largest exporter to Iraq, selling £428 million in 2001, despite
the existence of UN sanctions. In this period, the French resistance to UN
disarmament of Iraq was motivated by commercial advantage, for France had
been a huge provider of arms. It is difficult to believe that President
Chirac, who was prepared to help Saddam to create an Arab atomic bomb in
1975, was altruistically concerned with helping the UN inspectors in 2003.

The United States respects the humanitarian side of the work of the United
Nations, and would welcome the UN as a humanitarian partner. But one has to
face reality. France torpedoed American efforts to deal with the problems of
Iraq's disarmament. The result was that America has had to fight another
Gulf war, costing about $100 billion (£65 billion) and some casualties, when
they thought that they had dealt with the matter 12 years ago. Americans
feel that M Chirac stabbed them in the back. They are not going to ask him
to do so again. That is not the American way.

Another part of modern reality is that electronic eavesdropping means that
both the Americans and the French --and the British for that matter-- know
almost everything about each other's secret diplomacy. Every telephone call
between Paris and Baghdad, every currency transfer by Elf Acquitaine, will
be monitored by the CIA in Langley, Virginia. Modern nations do not have to
guess what each other's dealings and motives are. As never before every
telephone call, every electronic message, might just as well be broadcast to
the world. Indeed, if it were broadcast, that would only mean that it would
be less believed. The Americans know that M Chirac double-crossed them over
Resolution 1441; they know every detail of how and why he did it; they know
what it has cost them in money and in lives. They will shake hands at photo
opportunities; they will play the (set italic) Marseillaise (end italic);
they will drink toasts in mediocre champagne at diplomatic dinners; but they
will be slow to forgive and they will never forget.

For the present, that is just as well. Having failed to disarm Iraq for 12
years, ending with the fiasco of the volte-face over Resolution 1441, the UN
does not have the capacity, the self-confidence or the unity to take the
decisions that will soon be required. The UN is far from useless; it is the
best UN we have got. But it has always been like Shakespeare's proverbial
cat, "letting I dare not wait upon I would". Reconstructing Iraq will not be
a job for the fainthearted.

The objective is agreed, Everyone wants, or professes to want, an
independent democracy. Unfortunately, Iraq is divided into three major
religious or ethnic groups: the Arab Shias, the Kurds, and the Arab Sunnis.
This pattern is even more complicated than that, including groups such as
the Turkomans, who are small in numbers but have the influence of being
ethnically linked to Turkey.

If the new democratic constitution were to be based on the Westminster
model, it would produce an overwhelming Shia majority, which might itself be
dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. That would be unacceptable to the
Kurds and Sunnis, who between them make up about a third of the population.
Some combination of regional government, plus proportional representation,
might provide a viable democratic constitution.

Turkey, which is the nearest there is to a working democracy in a Middle
Eastern Islamic country, depends on the army as the ultimate national
institution. Iraq's democracy will only succeed, or survive, if it can
command the loyalty of whatever army emerges after the war has been won and
lost. Yet winning the war will itself destroy the existing Iraqi army, which
was hopelessly corrupted by Saddam Hussein. The conditions for
reconstruction include democracy, the support of Islam, a place for the
Kurds and the Sunnis, as well as the Shias, and the loyalty of the army.
That is quite a Rubik's Cube for an American general to solve.

Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-637292,00.html


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