Diane Alden
Wednesday, March 26, 2003

The left insists the war against Saddam Hussein is about oil. The record shows that is not the case. Currently the U.S. buys $15 million worth of oil from Iraq each year. The cost of the war is estimated at $100 billion. Even if the U.S. took all Iraqi oil and pocketed a net of $30 per barrel and produced oil at maximum capacity that would add up to $40 billion per year. That means it would take over two years to make up the costs of the war. (1)

The fact is America buys more petroleum from Canada than from Saudi Arabia, and only two of our top ten oil suppliers were Middle Eastern countries. America gets a lower percentage of its oil from the Middle East than it did 25 years ago.

Domestic oil production supplies 39.7% of our needs. Imported from our ten largest suppliers include 13.7 percent we get from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia sends us 8.9%. Iraq supplies 3.2% of our needs. Non-Persian Gulf states provide 46.6%. Canada pumps 9.1%, Venezuela 8.2%, Mexico 6.8%, Nigeria 4.7%, Norway 1.9%, Angola 1.7%, Britain 1.6%, and Colombia 1.4%. (2)

Beyond the left's notion that the war is about oil they have conveniently forgotten that their hero, Bill Clinton, sought military action against Iraq when he signed the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act. In fact he merely chose his usual ineffectual bombing campaign against Iraq, the Sudan, and Afghanistan. The left also chooses to forget that Bill Clinton conducted a unilateral war against Christian Serbs and in the name of Muslims in Kosovo. He did so without UN sponsorship. There was no leftist protest against this unilateral war begun by Clinton on the eve of his impeachment.

The left, including half the members and leaders of the Democratic Party, consists of a rationale that includes a profound hatred for George Bush, conservatism, as well as American Western tradition, the capitalist system, individual liberty, and the rule of law.

Invariably they remind us that certain U.S. companies sold biological and chemical materials to Iraq between 1985 and 1989. At that time Iraq was not our enemy but Iran was. Nonetheless, to our everlasting shame and with permission of the Commerce Department sold chemicals to Iraq. But in fact many Third World countries, including Iran and Iraq, relied on legitimate commercial firms as procurement fronts. They developed interconnected and convoluted schemes to get around international law and treaties to procure elements to create WMD.

Nonetheless, historians will someday relate that U.S. corporate dealings with Islamo-fascist tyrants and despots was nearly as bad for U.S. security as the Clinton administration allowing missile technology to be sold to the Chinese. The communist regime which in turn passed it on to terrorist states like North Korea and Iran.

Hopefully we have learned from our mistakes. Let us hope that our government understands that selling technology or products to tyrants will eventually be our own disgrace and impact our security.

In addition the left is wrong, the U.S. does not sell more weapons to Iran and Iraq than do Europe, Russia or China. These countries are far worse and evidence mounts that the French, Russians, Chinese and Germans have never stopped selling products, weapons, and the structure of war to Saddam. Russia sold missile-jamming technology to Iraq. But then according to human rights groups and arms trades publications Russia has been the champ selling weapons and technology to Iraq and Iran.

On the other hand, France continues a decades long policy of kissing up to dictatorial regimes like Iraq, Iran and Pakistan or to any country that has a buck to spend. Germany builds bunkers for Saddam and the French sell their souls. In the future, however, let us hope American administrations remember the lesson that selling products or dealing with the devil is the same as signing your own death warrant.

The left and the French, need to be reminded that French collaboration with the Iraqi despot Saddam included the construction of the nuclear reactor Osirak, which was destroyed by Israel in 1981. Even before the first Gulf War, France and others in our supposed European alliance were forming a Eurabian alliance. It was not merely about economic cohabitation but cultural and political “harmonization” as well.

In 1974 the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation was founded to strengthen the political, economic and cultural co-operation between Europe and the Arab world. That association became the most powerful Arab lobby through European lobbyists.

Bat Ye'or, is an expert on the Arab world, Israel and their relations with the West. She wrote "Eurabia: The Road to Munich." In this and other books she explains that changes in favor of Arab and Muslim world were imposed in European school teaching, universities and social life. Even textbooks were rewritten and Middle East and Islamic history conformed to accommodate Arab-Muslim sensibilities.

Over the years this lobby successfully influenced European policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. That Association endorsed the anti-Israeli points established previously by the Second Islamic Conference in Lahore, Pakistan (February 1974). Along with the cultural transformation demographic pressure of Muslim immigration n ever increasing Muslim immigration and, from without, an all-encompassing symbiosis on every level with the Arab-Muslim world. She states "That intense collaboration between numerous ONG organizations, humanitarian activities, workers unions, economical and financial relations. Scientific, nuclear and military training." (3)

The French connection in this European Arabization was far more extensive than anything previously believed. It included expansion of French oil industry, trade, and armaments in Iraq. As early as 1975, in an interview with a Lebanese journalist, Saddam called his dealings with France "the first concrete step toward the production of the Arab atomic weapon."

That same year Saddam went to Paris and met with government officials, including Jacques Chirac. France began selling Iraq missiles, helicopters, defense electronics and ultimately the materials and technology needed to construct a nuclear reactor. According to investigative journalist Hichem Karoui, who resides in Paris, "French journalists used to joke about the Iraqi reactor, referring to it as "O'Chirac."

After Chirac approved the Osirak deal and other weapons transactions for Baghdad, he became known in certain French business circles as "Mr. Iraq." (4)

After the first Gulf War, France's oil giant Total Fina Elf, benefited more than any other oil giant in access, control, and monetary gain from Iraqi oil. Some French businessmen were interested in helping Iraq with varied materials, from engines' spare pieces to factory tools and used machines, while some others were already offering to repair the damages caused by the French air raids during the war, or the ships forsaken in Shatt al-Arab and at the up-entrances of the Gulf.

Total Fina Elf spent six years in the 1990s doing preparatory work on the giant Majnoon and Bin Umar oilfields and have the most to lose. If sanctions had been lifted their production would have gone from about 3.2 million barrels to 25 million barrels per year. Of course there is telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel SA (ALA), car makers Peugeot SA (F.PEU) and Renault SA (F.RNA), and electrical equipment maker Schneider Electric SA (F.SCN).

Since the early '70s French companies have established themselves as the largest suppliers of goods to Iraq since the U.N. trade embargo was partially lifted in 1996. In 2001, France exported 660 million Euro-dollars, or 14 percent, of the oil-for-food program's value. (5)

The UN's oil-for-food program allowed Iraq to sell oil but the proceeds were to be deposited in a bank account in New York. The money was only to be used to buy nonmilitary goods under contracts cleared with the U.N.

However, Iraq has gotten around all that. When Iraq discovered in 1998 that many of the companies bidding for contracts in Iraq had also filed war-related damage claims, Iraq then began telling these companies that dropping claims was a precondition for winning aid contracts. The U.S. State Department called this economic blackmail but the French, Germans, Russians and some American companies called it business as usual.

Within the last four years 185 companies quietly dropped a total of $2.9 billion in claims against Iraq for reparations to goods and services previously given to Iraq. That is according to UN records which show that companies like multinational Daimler Chrysler AG and Glaxo Smith Kline PLC. Monies which the Iraqi government owed them.

If these companies wish to do business with Iraq in the future, Iraq demands proof that they have complied with its demands to drop compensation claims and will not sign contracts with companies that won't. What all this means is that some governments and various corporations have mocked the effort to force Iraq to compensate for the losses inflicted when it invaded Kuwait.

Saddam and his cabal than are able to use much of the oil money to buy arms rather than to pay back Iraq’s debts incurred before and during Gulf War I. That debt totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Smoking Gun: Crimes Against Humanity

The left turns a blind eye to the crimes committed under Saddam Hussein's government. Such crimes nclude, but are not limited to: the gassing of up to 5,000 Kurdish villagers in one chemical weapons attack in Halabja killings and disappearances of Shi`a and other segments of the populations - with victims believed to range between 250,000 and 290,000 over the past two decades, among them at least 100,000 people who are believed to have perished in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds; the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War; and crimes incident to the occupation of Kuwait. (Human Rights Watch)

The left asks for proof of Saddam's crimes. According to the Washington based Iraq Foundation, in 1991 18 tons of Iraqi secret policy and intelligence files, approximately 5 million pages were taken by Kurdish rebels and turned over to the U.S. and taken to the University of Colorado to be read and analyzed. Analysis by various human rights groups reveal crimes against humanity using weapons of mass destruction, torture, murder, decapitation, rape, and kidnapping. (6)

Human Rights Watch's Joost Hilterman was the lead scholar reviewing the documents on Iraqi human rights abuses. He relates that "They did include some "smoking gun" documents showing Iraqi government culpability for a great number of atrocities."

The papers include "memoranda, correspondence, arrest warrants, background information on suspects, official decrees. In 1994, Middle East Human Rights Watch issued a report called, "Bureaucracy of Repression." Human Rights Watch relates that the report indicates, "the evidence is sufficiently strong to prove a case of genocidal intent."

In the pile of documents is a document dated August 1989 which lists the names of 87 people who had been executed so far that year in one region, along with a summary of each case. "Crimes" included trespassing into forbidden zones and teaching Kurdish.

The papers reveal that among the "jobs" given to Iraqi "security" forces was a government personnel card for Aziz Saleh Ahmed. He is identified as a "fighter in the popular army" whose "activity" is "violation of women's honor." The man was a professional rapist.

Another document indicates that in March 1991 instructions were relayed from Baghdad Security Headquarters to direct officers to shoot at demonstrators with the aim of killing 95 percent of them and saving the rest for interrogation. Another instruction calls for the technical unit (chemical weapons) to be kept in reserve.

The documents also indicated a plan formulated in 1989 before the first Gulf War to destroy the Arab marshes on the southern border of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers. It was implemented after the first Gulf War, when the Shi'ite Marsh Arabs in the south rebelled against Saddam's oppression.

Nearly 300,000 lived in the marshlands. However, all were displaced or killed when the region was devastated as Saddam built dams and diverted the water from the region. Wildlife and migratory bird populations were devastated and many species disappeared. Only 15 percent of the marshes remain while the rest is parched and destroyed.

After Gulf War I, Saddam released approximately 60 million barrels of oil into the land and Gulf, causing damage 10 times worse than the Exxon Valdez.

In the meantime, Human Rights Watch testifies that 2 million Kurds fled across the mountains into Turkey and Iran, as many children and elderly died of exposure and starvation. In the south, the regime's then defense minister boasted that the Republican Guard had killed 300,000 people. Conservative estimates place the number of dead at 30,000.

The history of Saddam’s cruelty is long and extends pretty much from his ascension in 1968 to today.

*1971 - The regime deported Iraqi citizens to Iran, which continued into the 1980s. Estimates put the number of people deported at 250,000-300,000, including Arabs, Kurds, and Turkoman, almost all of them Shi'a. Shi'a religious scholars were executed throughout this period.

*1975 - The brought war to the Kurdish citizens of Iraq, forcing thousands to flee to neighboring countries.

*1978 - The Iraqi regime turned against the Iraqi Communist Party and carried out a wave of mass executions and detentions against ICP members. ICP sources estimate the number of members killed at 7,000.

*1988 - The regime used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing over 5,000 civilians and leaving a legacy of environmental poisoning that affects newborns even today.

* 1991 - The Iraqis invaded Kuwait. Killing thousands and destroying oil wells and infrastructure of Kuwait and Iraq.

* 1992-1995 - The Iraqi regime has conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kurds and Turkomans in the Karkuk province (Ta'mim). Several thousand families have been evicted from their homes, stripped of their identification cards (and their ration cards), lost their property and possessions, and told to leave the area.

In 1993, the International Commission of Jurists said that there was "sufficient evidence of the fact that torture has become widespread in Iraqi prisons" and deplored the fact that Iraq "disregards the most important right, namely the right to life." The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iraq said in November 1999 "Extreme and brutal force is threatened and applied without hesitation and with total impunity to control the population" and has frequently expressed the sentiment that the human rights situation inside Iraq is worse than any country since the end of World War II.

From 1980-1991 - The Iraqi regime attacked Iran. An investigation by the United Nations judged that Iraq was the aggressor. Casualties are believed to have been one million on both sides, including dead and wounded. (7)

Something Wicked

Last week one of the "human shields" who went to Baghdad to "help" the Iraqi regime received an unwanted education about the Iraqi tyrant and his suzerainty. According to United Press International, human shield Pastor Kenneth Joseph of the Assyrian Church of the East, was "shocked back to reality" when ordinary Iraqis informed him that "they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start." Joseph got all this on tape. Joseph relates " they convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill."

In that regard, every anti-war activist and celebrities such as the vile documentary filmmaker Michael Moore should read the collected Iraqi materials housed at the University of Colorado, they should listen to the tapes of anti-war activist Pastor Joseph. If there is a truthful bone in their bodies they would be forced to recognize the evil of Saddam goes beyond the norm even for the low standards of the Middle East and Africa. The only mistake America made was to wait so long to address that evil.

As it is many Iraqis don't trust us because we did not finish Saddam off in 1991. That allowed him to kill, torture, maim, rape, murder and starve hundreds of thousands if not millions more. Instead we listened to the UN, the Saudis, and the sensibilities of some of our allies, and some Democrats in congress. We failed, therefore, to finish the job in Iraq so as not to be perceived as a country in search of an empire.

In regards to the execution of our military personnel by Iraqi militia or irregular forces. A reader sent me a link to pictures taken from German TV program which showed the pictures of three young handsome American military men who had bullet holes in their foreheads, their belts unbuckled and pants pulled down to reveal horrendous wounds. There is no doubt in my mind that they were executed and perhaps intentionally shot in the gut or mutilated. In addition, the pictures of the black female soldier and three young men who were not executed showed America's own, frightened and anxious.

These captured members of the 507th are part of the brave ones, the heroes, the ones that a venal, shallow, hateful Hollywood and the likes of Michael Moore's have no regard.

It is Hollywood, the left, and some Democrats who have politicized this war and made it about George Bush or the Republicans. Considering "their" President Bill Clinton had earlier signed onto military action against Saddam in 1998, this hateful element is not merely disagreeing on principle, they are showing their true fifth column and partisan colors.

An Immoral War?

During the Vietnam War and in this current US involvement in Iraq, the left told us that these are immoral wars. Although their voices were mute when Bill Clinton sent US troops into Haiti and Kosovo.

Catholic intellectual and critic George Wiegal discourses on the morality of our effort in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. Wiegal states, "Thus, moral muteness in a time of war is a moral stance: it can be a stance born of fear; it can be a stance born of indifference; it can be a stance born of cynicism about the human capacity to promote justice, freedom, and order, all of which are moral goods. But whatever it’s psychological, spiritual, or intellectual origins, moral muteness in wartime is a form of moral judgment–a deficient and dangerous form of moral judgment."

For once America is not mute. For once it had the guts to do the right thing inspite of the rest of the world. The young men and women in Iraq should be proud, Americans should be proud.

About those fighting for what is moral and right in the Middle East, my favorite historian, Victor Davis Hanson writes in his most recent column, “The Long Ride:” "How do such men and women do such things, against such material, cultural, military, and psychological odds? I don’t know. But in the last year all those who have bet against the Americans now riding into the desert — elite journalists, out-of-touch academics, and self-satisfied Europeans — have been consistently wrong in their shrill predictions that we were either incompetent or amoral or would fail.”

He concludes: “Why is this so? It is not merely that so many are so ignorant of history, or that most who are degreed and certified are glib and swarmy, but not educated. No, the better explanation is that they rarely work among, know, see or care about the type of Americans now barreling to Baghdad — who are still a different, and I think, a better sort of people. And now thousands of them ride on to Baghdad."

The young men and women fighting this war against international terrorism and tyranny deserve our support. The war against Saddam's regime is a just war but it is only one chapter in a longer effort. It is a chapter that began when this country was attacked by militarists who also happened to be rich Islamist religious fanatics from oil rich countries. Nevertheless, there are other countries responsible for that attack, directly or indirectly, their turn is coming.

In the meantime, the soldiers, sailors, marines and our coalition allies need to know that this is a just war, one we didn’t begin. It began long ago, in fact it began in 1979 when Iran took American hostages. It continued when on September 11, 2001 we were attacked for the second time on our soil by Islamo-fascists.

The people in the U.S. military need to know they are the best of us. It is they and not the left, anti-war protesters, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Tom Daschle, or Jacques Chirac, who are the real peacemakers.

Sorry for the delay in the immigration series – I will get to it. Hear me pontificate on Phil Paleogolas’ "American Breakfast" on Friday mornings at 8:30 a.m. EST and each Wednesday on Marc Bernier’s show out of Daytona Beach at 11:06 a.m. EST. Also check out my Web site, www.aldenchronicles.com.

To comment, write alden@newsmax.com.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Saddam Hussein/Iraq

References

1. National Review, WFB. Return

2. American Petroleum Institute. Return

3. Bat Y’eor, “How Muslims Finally Conquered Europe.” Return

4. Hichem Karoui, Paris Phoenix Magazine Return

5. Dow Jones NewsWire Return

6. Iraq Foundation Return

7. Ibid. Return