Chirac pushes EU to drop hard line on Iran

VIENNA (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac has been pushing the EU to drop its refusal to consider letting Iran enrich uranium, despite U.S. and European fears Iran could use enrichment technology for weapons, EU diplomats say.

Sharing U.S. suspicions Iran may have atom bomb ambitions, the European Union's three biggest powers -- France, Britain and Germany -- have demanded Iran give up its nuclear fuel programme in exchange for economic and political benefits.

Iran says it has no interest in the bomb and wants nuclear power plants to meet booming demand for electricity. Tehran has frozen its enrichment programme, but refuses to permanently give up what it sees as a sovereign right to produce low-enriched uranium fuel for its nuclear power programme.

The Iran-EU talks had been deadlocked over the issue of "objective guarantees" that Iran's atomic programme will not be used to make weapons, with the Europeans insisting the only acceptable guarantee was a permanent cessation of enrichment.

But the talks took a new turn last month when negotiators from the EU's "big three" (EU3) and the office of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana agreed in Paris to consider an Iranian proposal that it keep a small-scale enrichment programme that the U.N. nuclear watchdog would closely monitor.

Several diplomats said this shift -- which came just after Washington bolstered the EU position by offering its own incentives if Tehran scrapped enrichment -- was mainly the result of pressure by Chirac, who pushed the French Foreign Ministry to drop its refusal to consider Iran's plan.

"Jacques Chirac ... is the one who's taking the Iranian proposal under consideration," said an EU3 diplomat, adding the French president had the final say on foreign policy matters.

Chirac, in a speech at a dinner in Paris with Saudi Prince Abdullah on Wednesday, described the EU3 talks with Iran as "concerning the peaceful use of its nuclear programme". He made no comment on the specifics of the negotiations.

"An agreement would give a new dimension to Iran's relations with the states in the region and the members of the international community," Chirac said, according to a text of his speech.

The Iranian proposal will be discussed in detail at a meeting of the EU-Iran nuclear working group on April 19-20 in Geneva and then at a more senior level in London on April 29, diplomats said. Continued

France lost so much money when Saddam was taken out of power, they are going to try and earn it back in Iran. They are our enemy and it's about time we recognized that fact.

The following comes from Bill Gertz's book, Treachery.

Chirac helped sell Saddam the two nuclear reactors that started Baghdad on the path to nuclear weapons. Chirac was so involved in Iraq’s first nuclear reactor, named Osirak, that those opposed to the sale referred to the reactor as “O-Chirac.”

In March 2003, Congressman Curt Weldon, PA., R pointed out that 4 years earlier, France did not seek UN support for its efforts to remove Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic from power because French officials knew that Russia, a traditional friend to Serbs, would have blocked the measure. Instead the French asked the US to help. Weldon said: “For the first time and only time in NATO’s history, along with our president, at that time Bill Clinton, they used a NATO military force to invade a non-NATO sovereign nation to remove a head of state.”

John Shaw, the Deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security lived for a time in Paris and told Gertz it was well known in France that Chirac “has been kind of in a godfather relationship with Saddam” back to when France jump-started Iraq’s nuclear program. Shaw said it was accepted fact in France that Chirac was getting financial help for his various political campaigns from Baghdad. The Army and Defense Department investigators had discovered that France was one of the largest weapons sellers to Iraq and that tons of armaments were st ill in bunkers spread out in the Iraqi desert.

US intelligence agencies were under fire over questions about pre-war estimates of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But intelligence on Iraq’s hidden procurement networks was confirmed. An initial accounting by the Pentagon in the months after the fall of Baghdad revealed that Saddam had acquired between 650,000 and 1 million tons of foreign conventional weapons covertly. The main supplies were Russia, China and France. By contrast, the US arsenal is between 1.6 and 1.8M tons.

By 2003, Iraq owed France $4 billion for arms sales. It was the massive debt that was one reason France was reluctant to military operations.

France has denied they knowingly permitted the arms sales. However, France’s government tightly controls its aerospace and defense firms, so it would be difficult to believe the transfers took place without their knowledge. Iraq’s Mirage F-1 was made by France’s Dassault Aviation. Gazelle attack helicopters were made by Aerospatiale, which later became part of a consortium of European defense companies.

Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee said that France’s selling military equipment was “international treason.” Congressman Weldon said the French were less trustworthy than the Russians.

In March 2003, US intelligence and defense officials confirmed that exporters in France had conspired with China to provide Iraq with chemicals used in making solid fuel for long range missiles. The sanctions bursting operation occurred in 8/02 as the US National Security Agency discovered through electronic intercepts.

The chemical l transferred to Iraq was a transparent liquid rubber called hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene, or HTPD. A French companies known as CIS Paris helped broker the sale of 20 tons of HTPD which was shipped from China to the Syrian port of Tartus and then sent by truck from Syria into Iraqi to a missile manufacturing plant.

Military intelligence teams found stacks of blank French passports that only confirmed what US intelligence already believed – that the French had helped Iraqi war criminals escape from coalition forces and thereafter escape justice.

Brand new French missiles were showing up in the hands of Saddam loyalists MONTHS after the fall of Baghdad. Officials in the State Department and CIA shielded Paris and offered implausible explanations that French companies had often made deals without the government’s knowledge or support.

On 4/24/03, Saddam’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, gave himself up to US authorities. He told interrogators that Saddam had misjudged the US because the French and Russian government had assured him that in late 2002 and early 2003 that the US would not attack. And they assured him that if we did try to attack, Paris and Moscow would take steps within the UN Security Council to block the war.

In 2003, US export control officials investigated a French company for supplying Iran with four specialty pumps made in the US. The dual use pumps, described as cryogenic fluid transfer pumps, were sold illegally and could be used as part of the cooling system for Iran’s nuclear reactors, which can be used to produce weapons grade materials.

In the early 90’s, US intelligence agencies became wary of French intelligence because the French spy services were conducting aggressive operating against visiting US officials and businessmen. French intelligence electronically intercepted phone calls, planted electronic listening devices in hotel rooms, broke into visitor’s hotel rooms and searched luggage and portable computers. The French have completely wired most hotels.

The French specifically targeted the following US firms: Allied Signal, Bell, Boeing, Ford Aerospace, General Dynamics, GTE, Honeywell, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, Los Alamos, McDonnell Douglas, NASA Space Centers, Northrop, Pratt and Whitney, Texas Instruments, United Technologies and Westinghouse, among others.

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