Thanks Stewart,
A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting article on this (Osirak reactor) in a local paper -- see below.
Jaro
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[The Montreal Gazette, 22 Feb. 2003]
Taking care of his friends
SUPPORTED IRAQ’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Chirac has a 25-year friendship with Saddam, and helped arm him
LORNE GUNTER
CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
French President Jacques Chirac’s championing of peace might have more to do with covering his own past misdeeds than any personal or ideological commitment to preventing war.
Chirac’s fingerprints are all over Iraq’s nuclear program. Back in the 1970s, when he was premier of France, Chirac freelanced a deal with Iraq’s then-vice president Saddam Hussein to sell Iraq a pair of reactors and train 600 Iraqi nuclear scientists and technicians, the bulk of whom are today on the list of 3,500 scientists and engineers UN weapons inspectors want to interview. Chirac even sought to ship Iraq weapons-grade uranium - enough to make three or four nuclear bombs - even though a safer grade was available.
Moreover, Chirac is known to have had a dose, personal friendship with Saddam well into the late 1980s. When he became a serious candidate for the French presidency, Chirac ceased to have any further open contact with the Iraqi dictator. It is not known whether the two men maintained their friendship privately thereafter.
Stratfor, short for Strategic Forecasting LLC, a private security-analysis firm with an extensive international intelligence network (www.stratfor.com), reported Thursday that it was able to uncover a quarter-century history between Chirac and Saddam just using publicly available reports and documents. “The re1ationship dates back to late 1974,” according to Stratfor, when Chirac visited Baghdad to negotiate the sale of the reactors
with Saddam.
The French president at the time, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, claimed to know nothing of the reactor deal in advance, an assertion supported by his industry minister of the day, Michel d’Ornano, who accompanied Chirac to Baghdad and was shocked when Chirac sprung the deal on him after it was completed.
Chirac also arranged for “uranium enriched to 93 per cent”- a grade easily converted to weapons - to be sent to the Iraqi reactor. But Giscard d’Estaing found out about it before the ore was shipped, and ordered it replaced with “caramel,” uranium that was suitable for electrical generation, but just three per cent enriched.
The air-defence system coalition pilots encountered around Baghdad during the Gulf War was largely French, sold to Saddam by Chirac, along with 60 Mi rage fighters, surface-to-air missiles and advanced radar and computers.
For decades, rumours have circulated throughout the Middle East about the closeness of the friendship between the two. During the Iran-Iraq war, Stratfor relates, “Iranians referred to Chirac as “Shah-Iraq.” And for his involvement in the building of Iraq’s Osirak reactor (destroyed by Israeli fighter-bombers in 1981), the Israelis dubbed it the “O-Chirac” reactor.
Saddam is thought to have financed part of Chirac’s 1977 Parisian mayoral campaign, too.
As recently as 1987, a French newspaper published a letter from Chirac to “my dear friend” Saddam, in which Chirac seemingly, though coyly, offers to help Iraq rebuild its nuclear program.
It is entirely in keeping with Chirac’s character - or lack of it - that he would be using peace as a pretext merely to prevent the detection of his personal complicity in Iraq’s weapons program. After all, one of the principal reasons Chirac ran for re-election to the presidency last year was to avoid prosecution for corruption. The French president is immune from prosecution, even on criminal matters, during his six-year tenure.
Between 1977 and 1995, while he was mayor of Paris and leader of the Gaullist party, Chirac is alleged to have established a vast scheme of kickbacks and expense-account fraud that netted him and his party tens of millions of dollars.
Even his grocery bills were picked up by Parisian taxpayers. Between 1987 and 1995, the Chiracs spent $3 million on food and wine for themselves - nearly $1,000 per day - on top of all their expense-account lunches, dinners and receptions. Chirac and his wife thought nothing of buying hockey-puck-sized tins of foie gras at $2,000 a can, and claiming the cost back from the citizens of Paris.
Would such a man permit a friend and mass murderer to keep stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction just so his role in their acquisition was never revealed? Bet on it, even if covering his own actions means one of those weapons might someday fall into the wrong hands, be detonated in London or New York (or Paris) and wipe out tens of thousands of people.
Beyond Chirac, the French government has lots of other self-serving reasons for opposing a war with Iraq. For one, a successful, American-led invasion would strengthen American influence in the Middle East, while further diminishing French clout. For another, the French want control of Iraq’s oil fields once Saddam has left office. They have a good chance of gaining control only if they can prevent a U.S.-led invasion and occupation.
Those who charge the U.S. wants war only for oil might consider that France wants peace for the same reason - not for the sake of peace, but for cheap oil supplies for France.
Edmonton Journal
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