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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (148853)	10/24/2004 2:15:52 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Your whole argument is that unless somebody can prove themselves morally 100% pure, they have no standing to point out any degree of turpitude. Very Manichean of you. I don't buy it for a second. Sure, the US sells arms - but it draws some lines, and selling nuclear reactors to Saddam Hussein was a line it chose not to cross. But France did, happily. The bottom line is that the US occasionally does foreign policy actions for reasons other than monetary, such as Kosovo or Somalia Where was our profit there? Or Iraq, for that matter - Saddam would have been super happy to pay whatever price we demanded to lift the sanctions. We could have demanded that he give all of Iraq's oil business to Halliburton & et. al. Profits would have been immense. It was national security, not the profit motive, that drove the US Iraq policy. But France? With France, it's strictly cash and carry. Check out the bottom line and you know their foreign policy for sure. France stood to gain billions when sanctions were lifted on Saddam - check out the TotalFinaElf contracts that would come into effect. Saddam knew precisely what he was doing when he bought them.