Posted on 03/08/2003 6:57:53 PM PST by longjack
A veto for oil and weapons
France, Russia and China are playing the peace card in the UN Security Council. In reality, though, it's all about their business dealings with Baghdad amounting to billions.
By Hans Krech and Heimo Schwilk
It was the hour of the hypocrites and moralists. After the German Secretary of State Joschka Fischer, at that time still chairman of the UN Security Council, had opened the debate about the work of the weapon inspectors in Iraq on February 14th, France's Secretary of State Dominique de Villepin caught the chairman's eye.
With a concerned voice and with the stage manners of a diplomat who represents the Grand Nation, the gray-maned Frenchman adeptly told his American counterpart, Colin Powell: "We French know, my dear colleague, what a fight for freedom means, but similarly, we also know what war and destruction mean!" "France, obligated to her eternal values, believes that we can create a better world together". But, as Villepin continued, we must do that with peaceful means, not with war.
After the long-lasting applause had faded, the Russian Secretary of State, Igor Ivanov, got in on the action with the announcement, "Russia will exercise its veto against American war plans in order to maintain the international stability". The Chinese representative in the Security Council nodded in agreement.
What connects the three potential veto powers who have engaged the Americans for months in a stubborn diplomatic wrestling match over war and disarmament in Iraq? The answer is as simple as it is banal: It's all about big business.
If the USA and Great Britain should prevail, Russia, France and China would be weakened economically as well as strategically. The leaders of several Iraqi opposition groups have already announced that after the fall of Saddam Hussein they wouldn't want to have economic contacts with states which would have supported the regime of the dictator.
Iraq has the second greatest occurrence of oil in the world with about 100 billion barrels. Added to that are significant natural gas stocks, which, until now, have hardly been exploited. The financial contracts alone for the reconstruction of the Iraq after the fall of the dictator will amount to about 200 billion dollars. Who will get these contracts is the reason the UN Security Council is presently fighting.
Russia is traditionally the most important economic partner of Iraq. About 90 per cent of the armaments and equipment of the Iraqi forces was obtained from former Soviet Union. An Iraqi delegation led by General Amir Rashid signed a contract in Moscow in February 1995 for the delivery of 4000 T80 U battle tanks to Baghdad. The delivery shall start as soon as the UN sanctions are lifted. It would be the largest weapons order for Russia since the end of the cold war. Iraq would be able to quickly regain full offensive ability in the Gulf and once again be able threaten its neighboring states Kuwait and Iran militarily.
In March 2001 Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan submitted an offer to the Russian government in Moscow for financial orders with a value of 21 billion dollars, if Russia would support the lifting of UN sanctions. In August 2002, the Russian government first officially confirmed 70 economic projects in Iraq, among these seven in petro-chemical areas and 14 in the areas of traffic and communication with a total value of 40 billion Euros. The contracts were signed in September. In so doing Iraq became the most important Russian foreign market of all, the most important hard currency source and the symbol of hope for an economic upswing in Russian industry. Furthermore, Moscow expects orders for the rebuilding of the Iraqi armed forces, such as delivering fighter planes, air defense missiles and modern radar equipment.
Russia's first contact with the Iraqi opposition happened in Washington in August 2002. Andrei Kroschkin of the Russian embassy explained to Intifad Kanbar, the head of the office of the Iraqi national convention INC in Washington, that the policy concerning Iraq was conducted exclusively by economic interests. Iraq is still indebted to Russia for six billion dollars.
Iraq's and Russia signed another three agreements for the development oil fields in the south and west at the beginning of this year. Furthermore the Russian energy group Lukoil disclosed that Iraq has overturned its decision of November 2002 to withdraw the contract for development of the West-Kurna oil field. The contract is valid again. Baghdad had cancelled it to force Russia to fully support the Iraqi position in the Security Council.
White Russia (Belarus) is sailing in Russia's wake. The country doesn't produce any weapons itself, however, it sells Russian equipment. Minsk is the sixth largest weapon's exporter in the world. As is well known, the Iraqi air defense hasn't managed to shoot down a single American or British fighter plane over the no-fly zones since 1991, because the radar equipment and air defense missiles have become obsolete.
It became known in March 2002 that 30 Iraqi officers at the military academy of Minsk were trained in the use of the modern Russian air defense misile S 300's the Russian counterpart to the patriot of NATO. The delivery of these S 300's to Iraq by White Russia shall have also been agreed to. At the Beirut airport in January of this year twelve tons of radio equipment and helmets for tank crews were confiscated which should have been delivered to Iraq from White Russia.
France is also behaving hypocritically in its resistance to Washington. What Secretary of State Dominique de Villepin forgot to mention in the United Nations Security Council: The Iraqi-French business relations are based on the long-standing and close relations of president Jacques Chirac with Saddam Hussein. In 1974, the only foreign trip to a western country the Iraqi vice-president at the time, Saddam, undertook was to Chirac in Paris. Thereupon France built the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak, which was destroyed in 1981 by Israeli fighter planes. Essential components of Iraq's secret nuclear weapon program come from France.
In the first gulf war (1980-1988) of Iraq against neighbor Iran, France supplied Mirage fighter planes and the anti-ship missiles, "Exocet", to Baghdad. Only through this was it possible for Iraq to hold against the superior Iranian navy.
Iraq still has substantial debts to France, also. Should Saddam remain in power, Paris beckons weapon's orders in the sectors of navy, air force and missile technology, and, as well, next to Russia, they will receive the most important share of the contracts for the rebuilding of the Iraq, including the development of new oil fields by the ELF group.
China, the third party in the federation against the USA,also has clearly defined economic interests in preventing the fall of Saddam. Chinese companies and technicians have been wiring the military communication facilities of Iraq for months, particularly in the area of air defense, with eavesdrop-proof fiber optic cable. Beijing can expect orders in the sectors of infrastructure and the navy if the dictator stays at the power. Two guided missile frigates have already been built for Iraq in China, which can be transferred ed as soon as the UN sanctions are lifted.
Germany, however, pursued a clearly defined policy opposing the Iraqi regime prior to 1998. She aimed for democratizing the country and thereby to protect the interests of the German economy. Hans-Dietrich Genscher was the first Secretary of State of a NATO country to denounce the Iraqi attack on Iran in 1980 as aggression. At that time, France and also the USA still strongly supported Iraq with supplies of arms. In 1991 Genscher demanded that Saddam be put before an international war crimes tribunal. German firms that violated the UN sanctions were prosecuted legally. By doing that, Germany secured for itself, on the side of the USA, the main share of the expected contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, as well as supplying Germany with mineral oil for the next 50 years.
After 1998, admittedly, the government Schröder/Fischer changed the strategic orientation of German- Iraq politics. Should the USA should be successful in an Iraq campaign Germany would be on the outside looking in, together with Russia, China and France. Germany would have no share at all of the expected financial contracts with a total worth of 200 billion dollars.
Artikel erschienen am 9. März 2003
Translated by longjack
You know, while exposing the hypocrisy of the French and Russians -- but especially the French -- this article does raise some questions about US/British policy.
We know this isn't a war about oil, in the crude sense of the US going into Iraq in order to steal that country's oil. That would be colonialism, which has never been what the US is about.
But upon reading this article, which impresses me as well researched if all the facts are true, then one could be excused for wondering if France and Russia may not have a legitimate grievance after all.
This is hypothetical, of course, but what if one year ago, these two countries were told that in a reconstructed Iraq, Saddam's contracts with TotalFinaElf and Lukoil will be torn up, and Exxon and British Petroleum will be taking care of business? We don't know about negotiations behind the scenes but I have to assume there was some kind of haggling going on in the time between the unanimous adption of UN Resolution 1441, and the point in time where Paris and Moscow came out in public and committed themselves against war on Iraq. Now I'm not suggesting that France's $60 billion contract, reportedly three times the actual worth of the oil, should be honored to the letter; we all know that this was mostly a huge bribe in exchange for a promise to protect Saddam via the UN.
Still I wonder, did the US and the UK leave France and Russia no financial incentive at all to sign on to the anti-Saddam coalition? If so, then the anti-war Lefties, clueless morons though they are, may be onto something.
I am presuming, as you said, France and Russia were invited to sign on the the coalition. I would ask, in view of the approaches of Russia and France in the matter, why France is seeking to push the issue to the point of endangering the UN, NATO and the EU. Russia appears to be acting appropriately from it's side of the bargaining table, firm, but predictable. From France's perspective, threatening to upset the entire applecart indicates a weak bargaining position. Presuming that's the case, for argument's sake, why is their position is weak?
longjack
Thank you. Frankly, the oil explanation for France's stance does not appear to make much sense: Total's deals cannot be exploited as long as Saddam stays in power and Iraq remains a pariah state. The only positive developement for Total's interests would be a regime change, and then France would ensure that the current deals are maintained with the new regime. The best and only way to achieve this would have been for France to support America all along the way and be rewarded in the end. What France has done the last few weeks is, in effect, turning America into a bitter foe, who will work hard to punish France and hence Total once this is over. Hence I am more than sceptical with this explanation.
Right. Now I'm only talking through my hat, and have no hard evidence at all on which to base my line of inquiry. But, if we assume for the sake of argument that the caricature of "Bush the Oil Man" has some basis in reality, then I could imagine a scenario in which the US administration played France "b*lls to the wall" and never really left open an option for France to preserve a reasonable financial interest in Iraq, and thus no option to climb down gracefully from its obstructionist stance.
It would have been an extremely aggressive policy for the US to pursue, and one that could have forced France into where it stands today. For this reason alone I do not consider it very likely that this is what happened, but stranger things are found in history books.
Note that I am not claiming that US/UK greed brought us to this point, but I would like to see some smart investigative journalists dig into this possibility.
(I hope I don't get banned from FreeRepublic now.)
Well, it is a reasonable possibility. I've heard many french officials saying in private the following:
- We have absolutely no interest in going along with the US since they are hostile to our interests anyway, no matter what we say or do.
- We don't give a damn about destroying NATO, its members are just puppets of the US anyway.
- If there is a major crisis in the UN each time other members oppose the US, it just means that the UN resolutions cannot be anything else than administrative formalities whose only purposes are to validate USian policies. In this case, the UN is de facto already irrelevant, and we don't have much to lose if the US leaves. Plus, if that happens, the US will look like the evil unilateralists and we might even gain a maximum leverage in the UN.
I can't believe this appeared in the German press.
Gut gemacht LongJack. Ich gratuliere.
It is interesting to note that the current crisis seems to have brought many an established international institution to a rather parlous state. If I didn't know any better, I'd almost say it was by design, like some one or some group, who we can't see, is calling the shots on this.
Take, for example, the current brouhaha at the UN. All at once, as if by magic, there appears from nowhere substantial and vociferous oppostion to a course of action everyone had previously agreed to! And in response, the administration, determined as much as anyone ever has been to go to war, seems increasingly content to give this organization the necessary rope with which to hang itself, as it appears it most likely will do.
And then there is the quixotic turn of events at NATO. Now, ordinarily in a situation like this (1) France wouldn't even bother to be involved, because it's not, and has not for a long time, been part and parcel of NATO day-to-day goings-on; and (2) even if they had, we'd ordinarily tell them to sod off.
However, that hasn't happened. I can countenance an attempt by the Germans to oppose, at least initially, the efforts in Turkey, but in the absence of French posturing they would simply be shouted down, or worse yet, ignored.
Then, too, there is the question of political partitioning of the EU because of this issue. Is the war as an issue bigger than the viability of the EU as an issue? Is it worth berating and belittling the newcomers, getting the expanded union off on the wrong foot, just so France can appear to be leading other European nations around by the nose? Can the schism that is being created between Old Europe and New Europe be worth the price, the renting asunder of the Grand Union that the EU pretends to be?
Of course, when it comes to the French shooting themselves in the foot, anything is possible. They have a grand and glorious past in this regard, so let's not sell them short.
Actually, in an historical sense, if Europe is left to it's own devices this is what they invariably do. There are people over there who can see things differently, and know that the short term expedient is no substitute for a long-term coherent view, but typically their voices are drowned out, primarily because there aren't enough of them.
For the nonce we must stay on plan. If the UN dies (i.e., becomes the reincarnation of the League of Nations), then so be it. If NATO collapses, then we'll have to find something to replace it, or better yet, determine if in fact it does need replacing. The EU? Really, who gives a s***? This union wasn't going to work anyway, let's not kid ourselves. If the dream (of some) of a pan-European entity is to work, they'll have to find some way of overcoming hundreds of years of European history. If they're going to fracture over an issue like the US going to war with a middle eastern dictator, they're going to have a very hard time in the future seeking and stressing commonalities. Apart from being on the continent, what do the Spanish have in common with the Poles, who have what in common with the Bulgarians, who have....well, you get the drift.
Back in the 80's, there was a small book out called "Last Waltz of the Tyrants". Well, we're not there yet. We may in fact be a long ways from that exalted state. But if war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the new paradigm of 21st Century warfare demands a parallel development of 21st Century political thought, and we simply aren't going to get that by relying on institutions that seem to have outlived their usefulness.
CA....
I agree.
You're still here - "Oil for food" seems to be the answer.
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