WITH one rebuilding contract after another going the American way, and with all key appointments in post-Saddam Iraq firmly occupied by the Anglo-American alliance, France, Germany and Russia are clearly feeling the heat. The leaders of the three nations even had unscheduled tripartite talks, and did their best to make it look like a normal happening, but the world knew for sure what was going on. That no one wants to lose out on the Iraqi feast is quite understandable. After all, we are talking of trillions of dollars, and a political clout that goes much beyond Iraq and the Middle East.
For years, France and Russia had been calling for the lifting of sanctions on Iraqi oil production. Now they are faced with a situation where the United States wants the sanctions lifted, but they want the curbs to be there, for it means some UN control over what is happening inside that ill-fated country.
This past week, France proposed the immediate suspension of all civilian UN trade sanctions against Iraq, but insisted that the 13-year-old embargo could not be formally lifted until UN inspectors certified Iraq’s disarmament. The proposal, as noted by the Washington Post, surprised the US.
The proposal would achieve a key French objective by guaranteeing international control over Iraq’s oil revenue until an internationally recognized Iraqi government is in power. And it sets Paris at odds with Washington over the pace of sanctions relief and the role of the UN inspectors in Iraq.
The White House and the Pentagon, which remain deeply suspicious of France for leading opposition to the war against Iraq, are concerned that the latest French manoeuvre could trap them in another thorny struggle at the United Nations while advancing French opportunities to exact further commercial and political concessions in Iraq. As quoted by the Post, an irked US official commented that “anything that levels the playing fields so that the French can compete on an equal basis” is not going to be acceptable.
William Safire, writing in the New York Times, has picked up the current, saying the “Chirac-Putin bedfellowship wants to maintain control of the UN’s oil-for-food programme, under which Iraq was permitted to sell oil and ostensibly use the proceeds to buy food and medicine for its people. (In reality, Saddam skimmed a huge bundle and socked it away in Swiss, French and Asian banks.)”
Before joining the paper in 1973, Safire, by the way, was a senior White House speechwriter for President Nixon, and is staunchly pro-establishment — or pro-war, if you like. In another of his Op-Ed column, he has praised America’s new policy of pre-emptive strikes, saying it was already paying off. “If threatened by a regime harbouring terrorists or likely to provide them with mass-murder weaponry, the US will not wait to gain world sympathy as the victim, but will defend itself by striking first,” goes the argument.
Back to the French issue, though, Safire is quite frank in his assessment of recent moves. “... Jacques Chirac cares little about reconstruction of basic services; he is more concerned about maintaining UN control — that is, French veto control — of Iraq’s oil ... Blackmail is the apt word: unless the US and Britain turn over primary control of Iraq to the UN, Chiracism threatens to hobble oil sales and prevent recovery.
“This extortion is greeted by the thousand or more UN employees and contractors involved in the present oil-for-food setup, many beholden to France for their jobs. And so long as the UN bureaucracy handles the accounting, it is as if Arthur Andersen were back in business — no questions are asked about who profits from the sanctions management.”
When it comes to Russia, Safire has suggested a way in which “the government of New Iraq can save some of the money it now loses by Russia’s eager participation in blackmail in the Security Council”: Declare that the $10 billion owed by Iraq under Saddam to Russia for unused tanks and planes will be repaid “on the day Vladimir Putin repays the debt incurred by Russia under the czars”!
Writing in the Toronto Star, Jean-Benont Nadeau and Julie Barlow have raised the question, “why Americans always single out the French for going against the grain in international affairs”. The writers belong to the French-speaking Canadian region of Quebec, and spent a couple of years in France studying why the French resist globalization.
“We had only been there for three weeks when we saw that the French were not resisting globalization at all, if ever so slightly — which left us two years to figure out why everyone thought they were.” It amazed them how easily France “wins the starring role as the enemy of American interests in any international dispute”.
In an attempt to answer why are the French so often “labelled as reactionary, protectionist, racist, Anglophobic and anti-American, not to mention immoral, self-interested and rude,” the writers have come up with five excuses: one, the French are never afraid to speak out; two, France has the biggest Muslim population in Western Europe; three, France has more than America on its radar screen; four, the French are grateful to the US, but only to a point; and, five, the French are an old people.
“The Iraqi crisis is only a chapter (and hopefully just a footnote) in the history of a very, very old people. But the French will always be singled out, like they always have been,” they write, quoting in the end Charles de Gaulle, who used to say that countries “have no friends, only interests”.
But the war of words between the US and France is not the only clash over what should or should not happen inside Iraq. There is at least one more raging, and this one happens to be within the American establishment.
Writing in the Fortune, Bill Powell has described it as being between “Colin Powell’s more cautious and inclusive State Department vs. Donald Rumsfeld’s go-it-alone, my-way-or-the-highway Department of Defence”.
The tension crosses a range of issues, but one of the key controversies is, how large a part should Iraqi exiles have in the interim and beyond. “One man, Ahmed Chalabi, has come to symbolize the fight within the US government about the place of Iraqi expatriates in post-Saddam Iraq. The University of Chicago-trained mathematician-turned-banker-turned-political leader in exile returned to his native southern Iraq on April 7 for the first time since 1958. He insists he has no desire for political office in his native country, but few believe it,” writes Powell.
Chalabi befriended Bush administration hawks like Wolfowitz before they were in office. They like and trust him, believe that he is able, and don’t see why he should not take part in Iraq’s political future. The problem is that the State Department and the CIA, in contrast, don’t like him and don’t trust him. “So touchy are both State and Defence about Chalabi that when the Defence Department flew him into Iraq, the State Department was not even aware of it,” writes Powell.
Let’s go on a tangent and have a look at what David Leigh and Brian Whitaker, of The Guardian, say about Chalabi’s “financial impropriety”, the most important of which concerns a $200 million banking scandal in Jordan. “In 1992, Chalabi was tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years’ imprisonment on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.”
Chalabi has always maintained that the charges were politically motivated, and the exact nature of the charges surrounding the collapse of his Petra Bank in Jordan is known only to a few people. But The Guardian writers claim to have obtained specific details, showing that millions of dollars of depositors’ money was transferred to other parts of the Chalabi family empire in Switzerland, Lebanon and London, and not repaid.
But those running the Pentagon are not bothered by this financial scandal hanging over Chalabi’s head. In the words of Washington Post’s David Ignatus, for the ordinary Iraqi, Chalabi is America’s man in Baghdad. In a write-up from the Iraqi capital — titled Bush’s Confusion, Baghdad’s Mess — Ignatus has given a graphic account of how “an unresolved political quarrel back in Washington about who should lead post-war re-construction seems to be hampering US strategy for the recovery of this battered nation”.
While Chalabi does have a liaison officer with him from the US Army Centcom, “which suggests he has not lost his Pentagon patrons”, Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, the man who recently claimed the title of Baghdad ‘governor’ of post-war Baghdad, “appears to have his own set of American patrons”. But that is not all, says Ignatus. “There is the Garner’s group, which plans to sponsor its own political process.”
How all these pieces fit together isn’t clear, and it is becoming a subject of anxious gossip among Iraqis, and a large crowd of angry Shiites chanting and waving banners in the street this past week were a noisy reminder that Iraqis may well be losing patience with the US.
The Shiite demonstration is particularly worrisome for the Americans, and officials in Washington, as quoted by Post’s Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest, readily conceded that they had underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength and were “unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country”.
The burst of Shiite power — as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to Karbala — is apparently forcing the US hand in Iraq, because it has virtually no diplomatic relationship with Iran.
“The administration hopes the US-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories and Saudi Arabia. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervour for Islamic rule in the crescent,” said one official.
Such fears, however, are misplaced. Muslims may get restless with American policies and actions, but governments in the Islamic world will never quite have the hang of it. In Afghanistan alone, Mujahideen, Taliban, Northern Alliance and Karzai have enjoyed American blessings at some point in time. Saddam Hussain was no different, and Chalabi will not be an exception either. The Americans will always have someone at their beck and call. The juggernaut will continue to roar. Unfortunate, but true.
WITH one rebuilding contract after another going the American way, and with all key appointments in post-Saddam Iraq firmly occupied by the Anglo-American alliance, France, Germany and Russia are clearly feeling the heat. The leaders of the three nations even had unscheduled tripartite talks, and did their best to make it look like a normal happening, but the world knew for sure what was going on. That no one wants to lose out on the Iraqi feast is quite understandable. After all, we are talking of trillions of dollars, and a political clout that goes much beyond Iraq and the Middle East.
