France's 'ethical' resistance a matter of self-interest
By Chua Lee Hoong
THE French-led resistance at the Security Council has flopped and potential French, Russian and Chinese vetoes are now non-issues. Unless Iraqi President Saddam Hussein steps down, the United States will unleash its military might on Iraq any time now and, once again, peace will be forced to take a bow.
But is that what it has been - a battle between war and peace? Hardly. Despite French grandstanding, it has been realpolitik all the way. The French have gambled and lost, at least for now.
As a number of Western papers have pointed out, ties between Mr Saddam and French President Jacques Chirac go back a long way. In 1974, the only trip to a Western country that Mr Saddam, then the Iraqi vice-president, undertook was to see Mr Chirac in Paris. The French leader invited him to his home for the weekend, and later sold him two nuclear reactors. Along the way he also earned himself the nickname Jacques Iraq.
During the Iran-Iraq war, from 1980 to 1988, France supplied Mirage fighter planes and Exocet anti-ship missiles to Baghdad, enabling it to triumph over the superior Iranian navy.
In the 1980s, it also sold Iraq around US$25 billion (S$44 billion) worth of weaponry. The bill has not been paid in full, and may never be if there's a regime change.
Then there's oil: Iraq's reserves have been estimated at 100 billion barrels, not to mention the significant natural gas stocks yet to be exploited.
Mr John Laurenson, a British journalist based in Paris, writes that in the mid-1990s, French oil companies Elf and TotalFina, which have since merged, negotiated contracts for two huge fields south-east of Baghdad - Majnoon and Nahr Omar - which have a combined reserve of 20 billion barrels.
In comparison, the US has total proven oil reserves of 31 billion barrels. Elf and TotalFina were prevented by UN trade embargoes from signing these contracts, but Iraq agreed to wait while France lobbied to get those sanctions lifted.
So 'if the French believe America's Iraq policy is driven by its appetite for oil, similar claims could be made about French efforts to avoid war,' he says.
And it's not just oil or arms. A report which was commissioned by the French Parliament and published in September last year, put the value of French exports to Iraq since United Nations sanctions were eased in 1996 at US$3.5 billion. French pharmaceutical firms, telecommunications firm Alcatel, engineering company Alstom and car-makers Peugeot and Renault have all made substantial sales in Iraq. France was also the Western country with the largest number of stands at last November's Baghdad Trade Fair.
Mr William Safire of the New York Times last week highlighted another reason why France, together with China and Syria, had a common reason for keeping US and British troops out of Iraq: They were part of a supply chain - complete with inspection-avoiding false fronts - supplying Iraq with materials used in building long-range surface-to-surface missiles.
In its own report, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag fleshes out the Russian and Chinese legs of the resistance: Both, it says, have billions of dollars' worth of contracts at stake in Iraq.
Russia - Iraq's most important economic partner since Soviet days, when it supplied the Iraqi armed forces with much of the latter's arms and equipment - has also negotiated a number of big-ticket non-military items in the last few years.
Last September for instance, Russia officially confirmed 70 economic projects in Iraq, among these seven in the petrochemical sectors and 14 in traffic and communications, together worth 40 billion euros (S$76 billion), making Iraq Russia's most important foreign market and hard currency source.
Both China and Moscow also expect orders from the Iraqi armed forces, such as for fighter planes, missiles and radar equipment. China has already built two guided-missile frigates for Iraq, awaiting transfer as soon as UN sanctions are lifted.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies and technicians are wiring Iraq's military communications facilities, particularly in air defence, with eavesdrop-proof fibre-optic cables.
And finally there's oil again: Russia has three agreements with Iraq for the development of oilfields in the south and west. Baghdad cancelled one of these last November to force Russia to support its position in the Security Council. The latter did, and so the contract is valid again.
Alas, however, the Americans have pre-empted the French and the Russians by forgoing another Security Council vote. The wind has been taken out of their moralist sails, and they will no longer have the chance to veto their way to economic riches.
It's military might that speaks now, and that, like it or not, is the American realpolitik answer to the French resistance.
straitstimes.asia1.com.sg |
