Top Bush aide savages 'selfish' Chirac

White House adviser Richard Perle tells David Rose that France's 'cosy relationship' with Saddam means it will veto a second UN resolution

A leading adviser to President Bush last night launched a savage attack on President Chirac's diplomatic campaign to block war with Iraq, saying that it was merely the product of French commercial interests masquerading as a moral case for peace.

In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board and a central figure in the circle of hawks around Bush, went well beyond US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent criticism of 'old Europe', warning that war without the further approval of the UN Security Council was now imminent.

'I'm rather pessimistic that we will get French support for a second resolution authorising war,' Perle said. 'I think they will exercise their veto, and in other ways obstruct unified action by the Security Council: they're lobbying furiously now.'

Perle agreed that support for war in Britain and America would rise if there were a second resolution, and that the UN was 'a symbol of international legitimacy'. But in words that will serve only to deepen the transatlantic rift over Iraq, he added: 'These five countries, the permanent members of the Security Council, are not a judicial body. They're not expected to make moral or legal judgments, but to advance the respective interests of their countries.

'So if the French ambassador gets up and expresses the position of the government of France, what you are hearing is the moral authority of Jacques Chirac, whatever that may mean.

'What you're hearing is what the French President perceives to be in the interests of France. And the French President has found his own way of dealing with Saddam Hussein. It would be counter to French interests to destroy that cosy relationship, and replace it with a hostile one.

'So how much legitimacy attaches to a French veto? At some point, people are going to have to start asking themselves that question.'

In Perle's view, the French position against regime change in Iraq is fatally undermined by its multi-billion-dollar oil interests negotiated since the last Gulf war: 'There's certainly a large French commercial interest in Iraq, and there are contracts that a new government in Iraq may not choose to uphold, partly because they're so unfavourable to the people of Iraq. Saddam has been prepared to do deals to keep himself in power at the expense of the people.

'My understanding of the largest of these deals, which is the French Total-Fina-Elf contract to develop certain oil properties in Iraq, is that it is both very large and very unfavourable to the Iraqis.'

Perle added that he found the claim that America wished to topple Saddam for the sake of its own oil interests bizarre.

'The US interest is to buy oil cheaply on the world market. And the best way to increase the supply of Iraqi oil, and so cut prices, would have been to abandon sanctions in 1991 and urge the expansion of Iraqi exploration and development.

'When you consider that there is now a prospect that the oilfields may be destroyed by Saddam, if what we really wanted was more oil, not only should we not be supporting Saddam's removal, we should be working with him.'

Perle denied claims widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic that the Bush administration intends to rule Iraq directly through a military governor for an extended period, and that it envisages no role for the Iraqi opposition. He was scathing about the 'conventional wisdom' among the foreign policy and intelligence establishment, which holds that the Iraqi opposition groups are hopelessly divided and the country far too fractious for meaningful democracy.

'This is a trivial observation and a misleading one, both by CIA officials and MI6,' Perle said. 'They're simply wrong about this. They don't understand the opposition. They say they're divided. Are they more divided than the Labour Party? I rather doubt it. Are they more divided than the Tories? I certainly doubt that.'

His own long-term dealings with Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and key figures in the main Kurdish groups, had convinced him and other leading US policymakers that 'Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform'.

'It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding under the leadership that has developed in the diaspora caused by Saddam's seizure of power.'

Reports claiming that a US military governor would keep most of Saddam's Baath Party officials in place and run the country on existing administrative structures were inaccurate and absurd, Perle said. 'The idea that the US would simply issue orders to the same mob that served under Saddam is ridiculous. This is not simply about switching one mafia family for another. American policy after Saddam's removal will be to assist the Iraqis to move as quickly as physically and practically possible into positions of power.'

As Assistant Defence Secretary under President Ronald Reagan, Perle was one of the key architects of the 1980s aggressive policy towards the Soviet Union, which Reagan dubbed an 'evil empire' and did much to undermine. He said he found it dismaying that many in Europe now found it 'politically incorrect' to describe regimes such as Iraq and North Korea as evil now:

'What we discovered from the victims of the Soviet empire, once they were free to speak, was that they agreed with us: evil was exactly the word they chose. I suspect that's the word that would be chosen by most of those forced to live in North Korea under Kim Jong Il, under the Iranian mullahs and Saddam Hussein.'

January 21, 2003

Security Council Sells Out
By Thomas W. Murphy

In 1997, a consortium led by Russian giant Lukoil signed a contract worth an estimated $4 billion to develop the massive West Qurna oil field in southern Iraq. A contract Lukoil cannot start work on until the U.N. sanctions are lifted.

Last year under the oil-for-food program, France sold $1.5 billion worth of goods to Iraq, the most of any nation. Major French companies like communications giant Alcatel and automakers Peugeot and Renault have landed lucrative deals in Iraq.

France's Total Fina Elf has exclusive rights to develop the Majnoon and Bin Umar oil fields which are believed to be the largest in the world and estimated to hold 35 billion barrels of oil; more than three times Total Fina Elf's current reserves.

Neither Russia or France initially supported a tough, new U.N. resolution that would require Iraq to comply with previous resolutions to disarm and cooperate with U.N. inspections. In fact, they did not see the need for a new resolution, and actually favored relaxing U.N. sanctions so that Russian and French firms could start working the oil fields.

SNIP

On December 8, 2002, Iraq sent both Russia and France a message when it cancelled the $4 billion contract with Russia's Lukoil to develop the West Qurna oil field. French oil firms, fearing they were next, began pressuring the French government to force the U.N. to resolve the Iraq crisis peacefully and Total Fina Elf demanded assurances its oil contacts in Iraq will be protected in the face of a possible U.S. attack.

SNIP

On January 16, in direct contradiction of Blix's statements, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister met with the Iraqi government and praised "the positive spirit of cooperation from Iraq" on the weapons inspections.

On January 17, the Russian oil company Lukoil "miraculously" announced that it had "persuaded" Baghdad to reverse the decision made on December 8th to cancel the contract with Lukoil to develop the giant West Qurna oil field.

Later that day, it was announced that Iraq and Russia had signed three new oil accords to explore and develop oil fields in southern and western Iraq.

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Cherchez Le Petrol
By Joseph Yeager
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 12, 2002

The defeat America Left, in its attempts to undermine the moral credibility of U.S. military action against Saddam Hussein, has been noisily proclaiming its opposition to the putative exchange of "blood for oil." By "blood for oil" the Leftists mean that America's real reason for pursuing war against Saddam is a rapacious desire for Iraqi crude. For those of us who were actually conscious on 9-11, and who witnessed the cataclysmic consequences of inattention to Middle Eastern hatred of America, such seeking after remote rationales for war when obvious ones exist may seem ludicrous. But the Americaphobes who make such accusations leave little doubt about the reality and sincerity of their beliefs.

SNIP

It is the French and the Russians who had a vested interest in keeping Saddam in power--no matter the depths of his barbarism--in order to preserve sweet contracts for Iraqi crude. For instance, Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, signed a 20 billion dollar deal with Saddam's Iraq in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oil field. Russia's Slavneft has reportedly signed a 52 million dollar contract to drill the Tuba field in southern Iraq, and a 40 billion dollar Iraq-Russian joint venture to explore oil reserves in Iraq's western desert reportedly is in the pipeline. Russia is also said to fear that a post-war glut of Iraqi oil would lower oil prices and thus discourage foreign investment in the development of Russia's Siberian oil fields. The largest long-term contract in Iraq's oil-for-food program is with France. And the French company Total Fina Elf has been negotiating for rights to develop the Majnoon field along the Iraq-Iran border.

It is, therefore, quite clear that the French and Russians have been busy grubbing for Saddam's oil money even as he gassed and contaminated the Kurds and steamrolled the Shi'as. It is equally evident for all with eyes to see that the hardball played by the French and Russians in relation to a tough U.N. resolution against Saddam had far less to do with high principle and much more to with lining their own pockets. One may justifiably ask, who, exactly, has been guilty of trading blood for oil?

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