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France, German, and Russian oil intersts in Iraq
Found this in the Washington Times. It's the largest paper in DC behind the Post. It's not a bs news source.
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France, Germany protect Iraq
ties
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
France and Germany, the two countries at the forefront of
opposition to the U.S. hard line against Iraq, have a long
history of commercial and other contacts with the regime of
Saddam Hussein.
TotalFinaElf, France's huge oil
firm, holds the contract to develop
Iraq's southern Majnoon and Nahr
Umar oil fields, which could
contain as much as 25 percent of
the country's reserves.
German firms were the market
leaders in supplying sensitive
dual-use technology to Iraq in the
years before the 1991 Persian Gulf
war, and they have been trying to
boost civilian commercial contracts
in more recent times.
Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi
defector who once headed
Saddam's nuclear weapons program, recently called
Germany "the hub of Iraq's military purchases in the 1980s."
Iraq analyst Kelly Nugent Motz, in a recent analysis of
Iraqi dual-use purchases that have helped build the country's
arsenal of biological, chemical and possibly nuclear weapons,
noted that many of the materials U.N. weapons inspectors
are now seeking are "things the West supplied."
"The real targets in Iraq — whether of inspectors now or
of soldiers later — are the West's own exports," said Ms.
Motz, editor of IraqWatch.org, published by the Wisconsin
Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based
research group.
The issue of Western economic interests in Iraq has
sparked an angry trans-Atlantic debate over motives of those
supporting or opposing a potential U.S.-led military strike
against Iraq.
European critics — and many of the hundreds of
thousands of protesters in the United States and Europe in
recent days — contend Bush administration policy is driven
not by Iraq's weapons but by its oil.
U.S. energy firms largely frozen out by Saddam's regime
could get priority deals to develop huge new Iraqi fields
under a new regime in debt to Washington, they contend.
But France and Germany are vulnerable on the same
score, according to those who support the Bush
administration tack.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, at a recent
Senate hearing on the future of a post-Saddam Iraq, recalled
being told repeatedly during a recent European trip by
skeptics that the debate about an Iraq war was "really about
oil."
"And I agreed with them," Mr. Biden recalled. "It is about
oil — French oil and Russian oil."
Richard Perle, a leading supporter of war with Iraq and
head of an influential civilian Pentagon advisory board, last
week said that TotalFinaElf was given a highly favorable deal
on exploration rights in Iraq as part of an effort by Baghdad
to buy allies against the United States.
"The French interest in the propagation of contracts that
will only go forward with this regime is perfectly obvious,"
Mr. Perle said in a speech in New York.
Iraq has not been shy about dangling threats and rewards
to its trading partners in order to bolster its international
support and end the diplomatic and economic sanctions it has
endured since the end of the Gulf war.
In December 1999, the Iraqi newspaper Babel, edited by
Saddam's elder son, Uday, warned France that its support
for a U.S.-backed U.N. resolution toughening the existing
trade sanctions could directly hurt French interests in Iraq.
French oil firms might be forced to close their Baghdad
offices and "lose the immense concessions which they have
won but not yet exploited," wrote Abdel Razzak Hashemi, a
former Iraqi ambassador to Paris. "The numerous advantages
which French companies enjoy on the Iraqi market could also
be halted."
Baghdad followed through on the threat in July 2001,
announcing that French firms would no longer be given
preferential treatment in oil-development deals, citing Paris'
support for the "smart sanctions" program then being pushed
by the Bush administration.
At the annual Baghdad international trade fair in
November, the Iraqi Information Ministry reported that
Saddam himself had ordered domestic buyers to "give
priority" to German companies as a reward for "the firm
positive stand of Germany in rejecting the launching of a
military attack against Iraq by the U.S."
Some 101 German companies were represented at the
Baghdad exposition, including companies offering
air-conditioning equipment, energy and transportation
services, cosmetics, textiles and other products.
Direct two-way trade between Germany and Iraq
amounts to about $350 million annually, while another $1
billion is sold via third countries, according to Iraqi
authorities.
All Western countries — including the United States —
have long involved economic ties to Saddam's regime.
American firms were among the many suppliers of dual-use
equipment and support that built up Iraq's conventional and
unconventional military arsenals in the 1970s and 1980s.
Even now, despite the extreme hostility between
Washington and Baghdad, the United States buys nearly 5
percent of Iraq's oil exports under the U.N.-administered
oil-for-food program.
German firms were particularly active in striking deals with
Iraq. Their relationships with Saddam's regime date back to
the 1970s.
The German daily Tageszeitung reported recently that it
had seen portions of Iraq's 12,000-page arms declaration to
U.N. weapons inspectors in December showing that German
firms were the market leaders in supplying Iraq, even in the
decade after the Gulf war.
The paper reported that 80 German firms were named as
suppliers in the Iraqi declaration.
Even before the latest escalation of tensions, U.N.
weapons inspectors had filed numerous reports of German
firms complicit in aiding Iraq's covert programs in weapons of
mass destruction.
One April 2000 U.N. "activity memo" regarding the
German firm Water Engineering Trading, found that between
1984 and late 1988 the company had, among other
violations:
• Sold, without license, $10 million worth of machinery
and equipment, and tons of chemicals.
•Supplied parts of the Samarra chemical weapons
complex (identified by U.S. intelligence as Iraq's prime
production site for mustard gas and nerve agents).
•Supplied machine tools for converting conventional 122
mm artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades into
chemical munitions, exported as cooling containers for
powdered milk.
•After March 1987, sold most of the components for the
$20 million Falluja chemical weapons plant to Iraq's Ministry
of Industry and Military Industrialization.
French firms show up far less frequently among the
companies cited by the U.N. inspectors, although Iraq did
acquire French Mirage jet fighters and French-made Exocet
missiles during the 1980s.
It was a French firm that won the contract to help build
Iraq's nuclear power plant at Osirak, which was bombed by
Israeli jets in 1981 shortly before it was to come on line.
Mr. Hamza, the former Iraqi nuclear engineer, recalled in
a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece that many of the
French projects in Iraq enjoyed huge profit markups.
Saddam's regime paid $200 million for a small French
research reactor in the mid-1970s that had a then-market
price of about $50 million, Mr. Hamza recalled.
"With these kinds of deals, is it any surprise that the
French are so desperate to save Saddam's regime?" he
asked.
But it is French oil interests in Iraq that have attracted the
most attention as the debate over war intensifies.
Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves
after Saudi Arabia's, and many of its most promising fields
have been largely unexplored since the economic freeze
imposed after the Gulf war.
Russia and France have the largest contracts, while the
major U.S. energy giants, including ChevronTexaco and
ExxonMobil, have been largely shut out.
Iraqi exile groups, including the U.S.-backed Iraqi
National Congress (INC), have only increased speculation by
issuing conflicting signals about the future of the energy
concessions negotiated by Saddam.
"American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil,"
INC Chairman Ahmed Chalabi said last year.
But a senior leader of one of Iraq's two Kurdish
opposition groups said the future of Iraq's oil wealth remains
an exceedingly sensitive subject in the discussions with U.S.
officials about a post-Saddam Iraq.
"We know there are countries such as France and Russia
with very important issues, but our first priority will be to
ensure that our country's oil wealth is used to benefit Iraqis,"
the Kurdish official said.
The Coalition for International Justice, a
Washington-based human rights group, released an extensive
study of foreign economic interests in Iraq on the brink of a
likely new war.
French, Russian and Chinese oil concessions, with an
estimated top value of $38 billion, are the biggest interests in
play.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President
Jiang Zemin, in a phone call yesterday, reportedly agreed
they continue to oppose military action while U.N. weapons
inspections proceed, a day after Chinese Foreign Minister
Tang Jiaxuan and French Foreign Minister Dominique de
Villepin agreed on the need to continue the inspections
process.
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