I doubt "Old Europe" has a clue just how angry a large percentage of Americans are right now. This won't be forgiven nor forgotten anytime soon.

French duplicity rules UN out of rebuilding Iraq

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, J’Accuse Jacques, 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.