France and Russia show their true colors..

washingtonpost.com
Lift the Sanctions Now


By Charles Krauthammer

Monday, April 21, 2003; Page A23


The Iraqi economy is devastated, the people destitute, the country desperately awaiting reconstruction. Fortunately, Iraq has oil. Perversely, it cannot sell its oil because it is still technically under the U.N. sanctions imposed in 1990 on Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait and kept in place when he refused to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction. All we need to get suffering Iraqis on the road to recovery is to lift the embargo and let them sell their oil.

Not so fast, says Russia's foreign minister. "This decision cannot be automatic. For the Security Council to take this decision, we need to be certain whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not."

In the history of diplomacy going back to, oh, Babylonian times, it is hard to find a pronouncement as cynical.

During the 1990s, when Hussein was concealing his weapons of mass destruction, the Russians did everything they could to lift sanctions. Indeed, in 1999 Russia refused to support the resolution renewing weapons inspections. It showed not the slightest concern about these WMDs when they were controlled by Hussein, a man who invaded two neighboring countries, attacked two others and used chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of innocents. But now that Iraq is run not by a local mass murderer but by an American president, Russia has acquired a sudden concern about Iraq's WMDs -- and wants to keep sanctions imposed, and the Iraqi economy starved, until those concerns are satisfied.

Russia's breathtaking cynicism is matched by France's. The French, however, are more subtle. The WMD pretense is simply too transparent. The French speak instead of clarifying "modalities" before ending the embargo.

"Modalities" is French for "payoff."

Having decided not just to sit out the war but to actively oppose the liberation of Iraq, France, like Russia, has only one card left to play in post-Hussein Iraq. Under U.N. rules, the sanctions can be lifted only by a positive vote of the Security Council, which means that France and Russia have veto power. Their concern about weapons of mass destruction and "modalities" is nothing more than blackmail.

What are they after? They want a continuation of the oil-for-food program -- Tommy Franks correctly called it the "oil-for-palace program" -- under which the United Nations has been using Iraqi oil proceeds to buy tons of goods largely from France, Russia and Syria (including equipment for "educational TV" and boat "accessories," as Claudia Rosett notes in a devastating exposé in the New York Times). They want the honoring of the enormous oil-exploration concessions that Hussein gave them (in return for their services to him at the United Nations). And they want the new Iraq to be saddled with the huge and reckless loans they made to Hussein to build his palaces and buy his weapons.

Until then, Iraq starves. This is blackmail so brazen that it is hard to believe the French and the Russians will have the courage to carry it out. Because of "the public relations aspects," a Security Council diplomat told The Post, "I don't think they can hold the Iraqi economy hostage."

But that is precisely what they are trying to do. What should America do? There are now reports that in order to buy off France and Russia, the Bush administration is prepared to leave parts of the embargo in place for now and continue the corrupt oil-for-food program that is a pig's trough for France, Russia, Syria and the U.N. bureaucracy that runs the scam for a 2.2 percent, billion-dollar-plus commission.

This is insane. We did win the war. And we will win the peace only if we can restore Iraq to economic health. And that starts by lifting the embargo. We should declare the embargo dead, let the oil-for-food program lapse and allow Iraq to reap the benefit of its own oil.

But if the State Department sentimentalists who worship at the shrine of the United Nations insist on a pilgrimage to Turtle Bay, we should go to the Security Council and submit a one-line resolution: "Whereas the sanctions were imposed on the regime of Saddam Hussein; whereas that regime is no more; whereas sanctions are now needlessly preventing Iraq's economic recovery; the sanctions are hereby abolished."

No "modalities." No negotiations. No deals. Dare France and Russia to veto.

If they do, if they dare so naked a display of cynicism, we then simply declare that the Security Council has demonstrated its utter bankruptcy and forfeited all moral authority -- transcending mere uselessness and becoming now an agent of harm, deliberately standing in the way of the reconstruction of a suffering and now innocent country.

We then ostentatiously stand up, walk out and declare the sanctions dead. We then open the oil spigots and rebuild Iraq.

It is the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

 

April 24, 2003
Chirac's Latest Ploy
By WILLIAM SAFIRE


WASHINGTON — Jacques Chirac's scheme to win French companies fat contracts in reconstructing Iraq has run into realpolitik: anti-U.S. actions have consequences.

After a decade of opposing any pressure on Saddam to obey U.N. resolutions, France reversed itself after its favorite dictator was brought down. Chirac and his new ally, Vladimir Putin, let it be known they would refuse to lift U.N. sanctions on the sale of Iraqi oil.

Last week's Chirac-Putin ultimatum: If we don't get French-Russian contracts to rebuild Iraq, we won't let Iraq sell its oil. You suffer the casualties; we get the contracts.

France and Russia also want to keep under U.N. control the currently permitted sale of Iraqi oil, ostensibly to buy food and medicine for a majority of Iraqis. That's because the oil-for-food bureaucracy headed by Benon Sevan let Saddam steer billions in banking and commercial business to Paris, Moscow and Damascus.

The blatant hypocrisy of all this created an op-ed firestorm. In The Times, Claudia Rosett exposed the secrecy of the oil-for-food boondoggle, manipulated by Saddam to favor Security Council supporters. Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post excoriated Chirac's brazen flip-flop of opposing sanctions on Saddam and then insisting they be imposed on post-Saddam Iraq. My own tirade appeared in The International Herald Tribune, read in Paris by Quai d'Orsay's would-be Talleyrands.

As France appeared to be taking the moral low ground, Security Council diplomats became uncomfortable. Then France appeared to have been struck by sweet reason. Instead of ending sanctions on a regime that no longer existed, France floated a proposal merely suspending sanctions until the Security Council decides that the new post-Saddam Iraq is not making weapons of mass destruction.

Some compromise. That neat trick is designed to force the U.S. into gaining the U.N. inspectors' approval before sanctions are ended. It would keep a heavy U.N. foot on Iraqi pipelines and keep France in the reconstruction contracts business. Suspension would put the emerging Iraq in a class with Libya, still suspended after its downing of Pan Am 103.

Fortunately, Colin Powell is not about to be sandbagged again. State spent yesterday preparing a U.N. resolution to decisively end, not merely suspend, economic sanctions on Iraq. If carefully crafted, it should contain language similar to that of the oil-for-food resolution. That would guarantee that proceeds from future oil sales held in trust for the interim Iraqi authority would be immune from attachment by previous claimants.

In plain language, that means that sales of Iraqi oil sold starting now would be for rebuilding the nation, and could not be snatched by France and Russia to pay Saddam's old arms debts. Chirac and Putin won't like that a bit. Would either of them veto the will of a Security Council majority and stand before the Arab world as greedy obstructionists? Let's see.

Planners of the trust fund flowing from the end of sanctions should draw lessons from the Saddam-dominated, secretive U.N. oil-for-food mess. Barham Salih, a Kurdish leader, told The Wall Street Journal that "half of the money allocated to Iraqi Kurdistan never reached us, thanks to bureaucratic obstacles erected in Baghdad and supported by U.N. Plaza. . . . We could not pay a single teacher or doctor with this money, while oil-for-food largess went to Uday Hussein's National Olympic Committee."

U.N. Under Secretary Sevan admits that the French bank BNP Paribas was chosen to issue letters of credit to most of the favored suppliers, but brands as "inaccuracies" charges by Ms. Rosett and me of secrecy. He cites a hundred audits in five years. But details of which companies in what countries got how much — that's not public.

The U.S. has a seat on the "611 committee," which supposedly oversees this $12 billion bureaucratic bonanza. Its reports should be available to Congress; Henry Hyde, the House's International Affairs chairman, is looking into that. Senator Arlen Specter of Senate Appropriations wrote to Powell yesterday about "reports that these funds are a slush fund," saying, "I urge the State Department to demand an accounting."

France hasn't seriously harmed the United States; we'll be friendly again. But in their hubristic drive for dominance in Europe, combined with their grubby grab for contracts, Chirac and his poodle Putin have severely damaged the United Nations.