SADDAM'S ENABLERS

France and Germany have evidently bonded like no time in the past two centuries, and the glue that holds them together is their anti-war position regarding Iraq. In undermining the UN's ability to rein in its most flagrant law-breaker, France may be destroying the one source of global influence it still has, which is its permanent position and veto power on the UN Security Council. So with so much to lose--its influence over global affairs, a post from which to hector the American hegemony it seems to fear, and in the end risking the very system of international law and accountability for which it constantly mouths support--why is Paris so hasty to appease Saddam? And why is Germany so eager to play along? Why is Belgium acting like their lapdog?

Turn over a few rocks here and there and the reasons become clear: Both France and Germany (and Belgium, it turns out) may have a serious stake in seeing Saddam survive. Oil contracts, to the tune of billions, are part of the equation, but the three European nations have a dark legacy with Iraq. They have been among Saddam's principal suppliers in the fields of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons technology. A declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document links Belgium and Germany to Iraq's NBC programs before the Gulf War:

THE AL-QA'IM CHEMICAL COMPLEX WAS BUILT BETWEEN 1980 AND 1983. THE
PRIME CONTRACTOR WAS "SYBETRA," A BELGIAN CONSORTIUM WHICH WAS
CREATED BY "SOCIETE GENERALE" SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS CHEMICAL
COMPLEX PROJECT. SYBETRA HEADQUARTERS WAS LOCATED AT 187-189
CHAUSSEE DE LA HULPE, B-1000, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

Societe Generale is a major congolmerate that controls a huge slice of Belgium's insurance, banking and industrial concerns. It has offices throughout Europe and in the US. Sybetra, the subsidiary of Societe Generale, lost badly on the Al-Qa’im project due to delays in its long construction timeline. But company personnel worked on the Al-Qa'im complex until 1988, just two years before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The same declassified document reveals that in 1989 Iraq decided to build a duplicate chemical weapons complex. It had bought the Belgian designs for the first plant, and contracted a German firm, Kloeckner Ina., to build the duplicate, which was at the same Al-Qa'im site. Work halted in 1990 due to UN embargoes against Iraq stemming from its invasion of Kuwait. In the late 80s, Kloeckner also helped Iraq rebuild its tank forces.

As for France, according to Dr. Khidir Hamza, the head of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program from its inception in 1968 until defecting to the US in 1994, the French helped build the Osirak nuclear reactor. Israel destroyed Osirak (which the Iraqis called Tammuz-1) in 1981, fearing it was secretly being used to produce nuclear weapons. Those fears were well-founded: according to the High Energy Weapons Archive, a nuclear weapons history web site, the type of reactor Iraq had obtained from the French…

was an extremely inappropriate choice for a nation just beginning a peaceful nuclear program. The 70 MW power of the MTR made it one of the largest of this type in the world. An MTR is typically only needed by nations with advanced power reactor programs that need to study how reactor materials behave under intense and prolonged irradiation, or require large amounts of special isotopes. Of course this was exactly Iraq's plan - to use it for irradiating a blanket of unsafeguarded uranium to produce the special isotope Pu-239.

For his part, Saddam Hussein did not pussy-foot around about his intentions. Just before flying to France to close the Osirak deal in September 1975, he gave an interview to a leading Arabic language newsmagazine from Beirut in which he declared that his country was engaged in "the first Arab attempt at nuclear arming."

France, despite a bout with misgivings in the late 70s, commenced construction of Osirak in 1979. Though Israel sabotaged Osirak and later destroyed it in a widely condemned air raid, France maintained an engineering presence there until 1989.

According to Dr. Hamza, the French knew all along that Iraq's nuclear program, ostensibly purely peaceful in intent, was in fact a weapons effort. In fact, Dr. Hamza also alleges that France’s continued presence at Osirak was meant to deter the International Atomic Energy Agency, the body that oversees compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which Iraq had signed in 1969, from discovering the plant’s true purpose. France was, as I've noted before, one of three "friendly states," and along with Germany and Russia supplied the bulk of Iraqi armaments and assistance.

So that gets us up to 1990, the year of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that brought about the Gulf War and subsequent UN resolutions against Iraq's weapons programs that allowed Saddam to retain power. And to be fair, up to this point France, Germany and Belgium were hardly alone as Western powers helping Saddam build his army. British, American and other firms from throughout the West helped in various ways. Notably, Iraq acquired anthrax via an American source, the Centers for Disease Control, though the Iraqi government apparently lied about its intentions for using the anthrax it obtained. But the US government never knowingly supplied Saddam with any weapon of mass destruction. Were the French similarly duped about Osirak? Not according to Dr. Hamza, who alleges that France knew all along that the Osirak reactor would become a nuclear weapons factory. The problem is he has never been able to supply any hard proof. A liberated Iraq in the hands of American leadership could change that.

After the Gulf War the trail goes cold. Ostensibly, the West stopped trading with Saddam after the Gulf War, both in terms of weapons as well as oil and more mundane commerce. But there are hints that some clandestine weapons trade continued, most notably between Iraq and Germany. According to papers filed on behalf of American Gulf War veterans in a lawsuit alleging that Iraqi chemical weapons may have caused “Gulf War syndrome,” German firms account for the majority of all weapons trade with Iraq prior to the Gulf War. In fact, 14 of the alleged chemical weapons suppliers are German, with no other state coming close. The US accounts for just two firms, which supplied little by comparison to the entire factories built under German contracts. It’s no stretch to imagine that with so many companies doing business in Iraq before the Gulf War, Germany would see fit to bend the rules and allow their trade to continue under cover. And there’s that business of the second Al-Qa’im chemical weapons plant. The DIA says construction halted in 1990. It’s reasonable to speculate that, again under cover, Germany resumed construction some time in the 1990s. And according to recent intelligence, Al-Qa’im has been completed. By whom, if not the original German firm? Iraq claims the plant has purely peaceful purposes. But that’s what they said about the Osirak nuclear power plant, too.

France, Germany and Belgium are currently leaving no option untried in their quest to halt a US-led invasion of Iraq should it become necessary. Their behavior, at least on the surface, seems irrational, but if they all fear exposure it makes sense. If Germany and Belgium really did help build Iraq’s chemical weapons factories, and if France really did knowingly help Iraq join the nuclear club, fear that definitive proof would surface in a liberated Iraq could drive them to destroy their relations with the US and Britain, risk fracturing NATO over the issue of protecting Turkey from Iraqi counter attack, and even risk destroying the United Nations, their greatest source of global influence. They act like they’re guilty of something; assisting Iraq’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction may be their crime.