That's wasn't my main point, either. "It's all about oil," or else Saddam wouldn't have had as much power as he once had, and the French and Russians wouldn't have done business with him and funding his regime and palaces.
To say we must listen to our European "allies" is to ignore the deals they have made and the hand they had in propping up a tyrant. Sure, we've made deals with him in the 80's, but not recently or in the last decade, either. If the allegations in the Wash. Times are true, the French and the Russians were dealing with him all the way up to the point where Saddam's statue fell in Baghdad.
I am struggling to lock in on the point you are trying to make..but in any case, this week it was reported that Halliburton has shell companies setup in the Cayman and in the ME that have been doing business with Iran...members of CBS 60 minutes' cast visited both offices and found them basically empty, in the case of the Cayman office, and merged with the parent company's HQ in the case of the Dubai office....this is supposedly illegal altogether. Assuming the WT (a murdoch newspaper) is right, and by the way other papers have cast doubt on the veracity of the sources of the Iraq_French connection, the French and Russians could have been doing business with Iraq as rogue corporate entities stretching the rule of law, just as Halliburton seems to be doing. I suppose LeMonde is running that article now. I suggest that you treat these stories with some skepticism until the proof is provided that indicts Chirac, in this case, who is the leader accused in the WT of having taken bribes from Saddam.
Lastly, Cheney, who along with Rumsfeld played a strong role in brushing aside old Europe last year, is now there trying to mend fences. Then again we have an election coming up and they gotta fix Iraq and soften their image with the electorate all in the next 5 months.
Al |
