It's a fact that Chirac was Saddam's best buddy for decades. Iraq's military was filled entirely with Russian and French equipment from the beginning of the Saddam era to the end. Chirac also sold Saddam two nuclear reactors and tried to sell him weapons grade fuel. Plus the French allied with the Russians and Chinese to protect Saddam from a proposed UN human rights tribunal.
boston.com
JACQUES CHIRAC'S OPPOSITION TO the Bush administration's march to war may have won him the applause of antiwar activists, but others have noted that the French president may have less than principled reasons for his position. After all, France has economic ties to Iraq, and Chirac has millions of Muslim voters to worry about, too. And a photograph which has recently been circulating online offers a mute, though eloquent, J'accuse of its own.
In this 1975 photo, then-Vice President Hussein is seen touring the Cadarache nuclear power station in France, accompanied by a bespectacled Chirac, France's prime minister at the time. Chirac freelanced a deal to sell Saddam two nuclear reactors, and arranged to have French nuclear scientists and engineers train their counterparts in Iraq-most of whom are now on the list of Iraqi scientists and engineers that UN weapons inspectors want to chat with. Not only did Chirac help build Iraq's ''Osirak'' reactor-the Israelis dubbed it ''O-Chirac''-near Baghdad, but he also sought to ship Iraq weapons-grade uranium, even though a safer grade was available. (France's president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, scotched the plan.) By the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was France's single largest arms customer; Iranians referred to Chirac as ''Shah-Iraq.'' In 1981, Israeli fighter pilots-including a 26-year-old Ilan Ramon, who died last month on the space shuttle Columbia-destroyed the Osirak reactor shortly before it was due to deliver nuclear capacity to Iraq. Chirac, echoing the views of many world leaders at the time, described the Israeli raid as ''unacceptable.''
news.bbc.co.uk
...one of the options was for the UN, some years ago, to set up a UN war crimes tribunal on Iraq. And you know who blocked it? France, Russia and China. And as recently as two years ago the UK and other countries tried to get the UN to set up that tribunal. So France should be reminded of that. Why did they block that? Because I think that would have been an option to war. |
