Khidhir Hamza says if you want to know why the French and the Germans are delaying and obstructing for Saddam, you simply have to follow the money:
What has become obvious is that the U.N. inspection process was designed to delay any possible U.S. military action to disarm Iraq. Germany, France, and Russia, states we called “friendly” when I was in Baghdad, are also engaged in a strategy of delay and obstruction.
In the two decades before the Gulf War, I played a role in Iraq’s efforts to acquire major technologies from friendly states. In 1974, I headed an Iraqi delegation to France to purchase a nuclear reactor. It was a 40-megawatt research reactor that our sources in the IAEA told us should cost no more than $50 million. But the French deal ended up costing Baghdad more than $200 million. The French-controlled Habbania Resort project cost Baghdad a whopping $750 million, and with the same huge profit margin. With these kinds of deals coming their way, is it any surprise that the French are so desperate to save Saddam’s regime?
Germany was the hub of Iraq’s military purchases in the 1980s. Our commercial attach