Who’s the greedy capitalist pig now?

So, pretty much everyone knows France has been, shall we say, less than cooperative with the US over the last few years, particularly over Iraq. Now we know why. A report called the Duelfer Report is strikingly revealing about a French connection to Iraq, specifically, the Oil-for-Food scandal. Oil-for-Food was a program the UN set up post-Desert Storm (Iraq 1) in order to aid the Iraqi people while maintaining fairly strict economic sanctions imposed to combat Saddam Hussein’s belligerent foreign policy. The deal was to have Iraq export it’s oil for food and medical supplies from Western countries.

So, what’s the scandal? Well, bribes were taken, oil was stolen, food wasn’t delivered, and the end result is that the UN failed, and Saddam was buying weapons with the money that was supposed to buy food. In fact, Saddam Hussein redirected economic resources to his political party and those that followed his particular brand of Islam (the Sunnis, IIRC), making the rest of the country suffer. Kurds in the North were still being ignored, as were the Shi’ites, which is pretty much religious discrimination. So Saddam’s bad, we know that.

Some people very high up in the ranks, Charles Pasqua, former French Minister of the Interior, Patrick Macguin, a wealthy French businessman with a coincidentally close friendship to the old Stonewall Humanist himself Jacques Chirac (French President). Another businessman named Maugein set up Ibex Co. to launder oil for his company on the order of 47 million barrels, not to mention the 15 million he personally received. Interestingly enough, he contributed heavily to Chirac’s election campaigns. Sounds mighty shady, even if they can’t prove Chirac’s connection. (But hey, they got Capone on tax evasion, so there’s hope =) In fact, some guy actually founded a French Iraqi Export Club, and he was on the take too! Go figure. The list of bribe takers is long, and honestly, I suspect longer in reality than the report shows, as those in power have ways of making others take the fall for them. What’s important about these bribes? Well, Saddam was getting his weapons somewhere, and it wasn’t just from the Russians (SCUDS, Katyusha rockets, AK-47s, their entire tank supply, not to mention other miscellaneous small arms).

So, now we know why the French were so adamant against a war in Iraq. They were up to their necks in dirty deals with Saddam. Why vote to take out the man who’s lining your pockets and thumbing his nose at the Americans you hate anyway? How many times will it take for us to come in there and remove a foreign power occupying their country for them to stop resenting us? Or maybe we should’ve let Hitler stay there and set up camp under the Arc de Triumph. Maybe then they’d be burning Swastikas instead of Stars and Stripes.