Date: January 2005
There is probably no more nauseating country on the planet, than France. France has supported terrorist regimes and rogue states, including the Soviets and Baathist Iraq, for 30 years. Of course they have profited handsomely by their perfidy. It is not an exaggeration to state that the French lust for export dollars, political leadership of the anti-American camp, and their desire to protect French jobs drives French foreign policy.

The story about how France funds terror, including its sales of arms and civilian production to Hussein’s Iraq and 25 other terrorist regimes, has yet to engage the Western media [to the extent say, that Bush’s national guard service did], yet French links with terrorist regimes is one reason why the EU and UNO do not support the war on terror. It is a vital story that state owned broadcasters and pro-Muslim, pro-French media sources in the West refuse to cover. Yet the message is slowly filtering out that France is part of the problem.

Many sources reveal this French perfidy. For example in his excellent book, ‘How the French Betrayed America’, Paris based defense expert and bilingual reporter, Kenneth Timmerman lays out the damning story linking France with the construction of Iraqi armed might during the 1970s and 80s. In addition he provides proof, from involved intermediaries, that Hussein kicked back payments to Chirac, payable in cash in amounts of U$400.000. It is estimated that Chirac received about U$250 million in such kickbacks and other transfers of Iraqi largesse [indeed one year after meeting Hussein in 1975 Chirac started his own political party and has never revealed the sources of his financing, which under French law he does not need to do].

Timmerman is an inside defense reporter in Paris, with 20 years of experience and has contacts at the highest level in the French political elite. He makes the claim that throughout 3 decades from 1970-2003 the French defense and aerospace industry, including thousands of jobs, were dependent upon Iraqi contracts. It is hard to refute this claim and his sources. Indeed the French government threatened Timmerman with violence for his investigative work. The scale of the corruption and kickbacks to various French politicians is simply astounding. The French pro-Iraq lobby, which includes Chirac and most senior French politicos, has had a huge impact on French foreign policy. But French funding of terror extends beyond Iraq.

In the past 30 years the French have taken advantage of US Laws and conventions against lending to certain countries, mainly those on the US’ proscribed list of terrorist regimes and sponsors of terror. These laws and stipulations restrain U.S. banks and companies. Into this vacuum French banks and industry have plied their lucrative trade. Economic and political corruption has inevitably led to a realignment of French political orientation to become the West’s staunchest defender of Arab, Muslim and rogue regime ‘rights’. There is no denying that France actively courts anti-American allies.

Terrorist funding and export sales has informed French foreign policy since the 1970s when the French were selling the Soviets western and American technology [in violation of Reagan’s Co-Com agreement], which propped up the failing Soviet regime. In fact the Soviets did not have the funds to engage in defense spending and were reliant on stealing US technology – usually through French firms. Without French duplicity the Soviet empire would have collapsed sooner. That France reaped huge financial rewards for aiding Soviet totalitarianism is a given.

Currently the French are in toto the largest financiers of the top 25 rogue and terrorist regimes on the planet. According to the Real Instituto and M. Gonzalez at the Wall Street Journal, France is the top terrorist backer in the world today. France was not just Baathist Iraq's largest contributor of funds but French banks have financed other odorous regimes. They are now the prime lenders to Iran and Cuba and have helped such U.S. foes as Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam. In the past few years French banks have lent the Iranian Mullahs U$2.5 billion for example. In the following list of terrorist regimes only Syria receives US money. French banks seem to be almost anywhere U.S. banks are absent. They lend in 57 countries where the U.S. is not present, and are the main lenders in 23 of those.

Source: Real Instituto Elcano 2003, realinstitutoelcano.org.analisis/360.asp

Not only are the French important financiers of rogue and terrorist regimes but so too is Germany, France's partner in the ‘pro-Saddam’, ‘Pro-Terror’ coalition. German banks are North Korea's biggest lenders, and are also prime lenders to Syria and Libya. As well France, Germany and the EU are the largest contributors to the Palestinian Authority giving the PA U$300 mn per annum, much of which is abused, stolen and used to fund terror or increase the personal accounts of PA terrorists like Arafat. Such funding has always been defended by France and Germany as necessary to promote the region’s economy and peace initiatives. The fact that the EU can neither account for the spend of this money nor bother to do real audits indicates its indifference to financing terror.

With the successful US overthrow of Hussein, French attention has now been directed towards Iran. Iran needs Western money, technology and aid to develop its infrastructure and its nuclear program. The French of course are only too happy to oblige. The French and Iranians trade about 5 billion dollars of goods per annum, with Iran posting a trade surplus. In 2004 the French Foreign Trade Minister speaking at a seminar on Foreign Investment Prospect in Iran, said that Iran ranks first among French Trade partners in the Middle East. Mind-numbingly he stated that the reforms made on foreign investment policy in Iran and the country's suitable investment atmosphere have paved the ground for expansion of bilateral trade relations. Apparently an immoral fascist theocracy, which suppresses its people, demonizes the West, actively sponsors terror throughout the globe, and possesses the threat of a nuclear weapon, does not impinge on French economic strategy. How is that for political and moral post – modern relativism.

French investments in Iran are predominantly in oil, gas and transport projects. France is now cooperating with Iran in car making, water treatment, wastewater treatment, and the electronics sectors. It is the exact replica and model of French investments and initiatives in Iraq during the 1980s and 90s. French and UNO diplomatic posturing over Iran’s nuclear program has protected these economic investments. The recent initiative and compromise brokered by the three European foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain regarding Teheran’s nuclear policy was a victory of sorts for the both sides and was the best of guarantees for France and its economic interests. As they have done in the past, the French have no compunction in arming and empowering rogue regimes and will use International organisations and selective partners to legitimize their economic avarice.

French Immorality and the Oil for Food Scam
As the funding of rogue, terrorist and fascist regimes confirm, the French feel ennobled to offer their corrupt statist view of the world as the alternative to the US model. This vision of France extends beyond politics. Much evidence suggests that it has become deeply embedded in the French psyche and encompasses not just finance and politics but also culture, media and almost every other human activity. France, in all its manifestations, positions itself as an alternative to the U.S., and expects to profit from it. Such obvious political motives and crass economic calculation was revealed in the 2004 Iraq Survey Groop report [ISG].

The ISG makes apparent the fecklessness of the French and the United Nations, not to mention the treacherous conduct of other security council members, in its dealings with Saddam's regime between the end of the 1991 Gulf war and last year's Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the diplomatic build-up to the 2003 war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, the two most vociferous opponents of military action were Russia and France. Even though Presidents Putin and Chirac reluctantly signed up to UN Security Council resolution 1441 in November 2002 - which threatened Saddam with "serious consequences" if he did not fully comply - they were at the forefront of the international campaign to block military action. At the time it was felt that their main motivation was to protect their lucrative trade ties with Baghdad. In late 2002, Saddam still owed the Russians some $10 billion, mainly for illegal arms deals. France came next in the trade rankings.

Even so, Moscow and Paris tried to claim that they were opposing the war as a matter of principle. That was certainly the impression Chirac sought to give when he announced that he would veto any second UN resolution that authorized military action. Putin also opposed the invasion of Iraq and, just as hostilities were about to commence, even dispatched Yevgeny Primakov, his trusty former KGB colleague, to Baghdad on a last-ditch mission to persuade Saddam to comply and avoid war. Thanks to the efforts of the ISG team, we now know that there was another, even less palatable, explanation for their duplicity. As well as seeking to protect their lucrative trade ties, the opposition of France and Russia to the war was that both countries' political establishments were deeply implicated in a lucrative scam to divert the profits of the UN's oil-for-food programme into their own private bank accounts.

From the moment the oil-for-food programme was introduced in 1996, Saddam concentrated all his energies on attempting to subvert it. The complex oil-for-food programme was introduced so that the profits from UN-supervised Iraqi oil sales would pay for essential healthcare supplies. The programme was conceived, it should be remembered, to counter the mounting effectiveness of the propaganda campaign of hard-Left activists such as George Galloway, the former ignorant English Labour MP, who argued that the wide-ranging UN sanctions introduced following the Gulf war were responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.

But as the ISG report clearly demonstrates, Saddam skillfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding. Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

By November 2001 - just two months after the 9/11 attacks - Saddam was so confident of breaking the UN's sanctions stranglehold that Baghdad hosted a trade fair that attracted hundreds of foreign companies in the expectation that they would soon be able to establish lucrative trade links with Saddam's regime. As Charles Duelfer, the author of the ISG report commented, by 2001 Saddam's "long struggle to outlast the containment policy seemed tantalisingly close". The 9/11 attacks ended his hopes of survival as the West, or rather Washington and London, finally found the will to force the Iraqi leader to comply with the ceasefire obligations that he committed himself to at the end of the first Gulf war.

While the ISG report provides embarrassing reading for all those who actively participated in Saddam's scam, the real victim is the UN itself, whose claim to the moral high ground when confronting rogue regimes and dictators now lies in tatters. Indeed, the failure of the UN to confront the error of its ways - Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, still refuses to make public the findings of his oil-for-food inquiry - poses a serious problem for those countries that remain committed to prosecuting the war on terror. The sanctions regime against Saddam may have been a failure, but the threat of sanctions nevertheless remains an important first step in trying to persuade rogue states to reform. If Iran, for example, continues to defy the International Atomic Energy Agency over its nuclear programme, the logical response would be for the UN to impose sanctions against Teheran. But after the UN's Iraq debacle, it is highly unlikely that anyone - least of all Iran - could take such a threat seriously. [see the book by Con Coughlin - Saddam: The Secret Life (Macmillan) for more information]

France, EU and PA terror
France is also funding, along with its EU allies, Palestinian terror. Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy and author of Narcoterrorism, Evil Money, and most recently Funding Evil, a study of the financing of international terror, wrote in EUobserver that “volumes of the Palestinian Authority’s own documents, including many graced by Yasser Arafat’s own signature, order the Palestinian Ministry of Finance—recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in EU budgetary aid . . . to pay members of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade for killing Israeli citizens or to pay for the procurement of explosives and illegal weapons.”

Why can’t the EU and France stop funding PA sponsored terror ? “The Europeans,” Ilka Schroeder said at Ben-Gurion University, “supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor, and through this, challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power. Therefore, the Al-Aksa Intifada should be understood as a proxy war between Europe and the United States.” In an earlier address in New York, she said it is “an open secret within the European Parliament that EU aid to the Palestinian Authority has not been spent correctly. The European Parliament does not intend to verify whether European taxpayers’ money could have been used to finance anti-Semitic murderous attacks.” The EU and France have always been pro-Arab and pro-Muslim. In part this is due to domestic politics [anti-American and appease Muslim minorities], as well as economic opportunities to sell where Americans cannot. The poverty of Left – Liberalism and internationalism is clear.

France, the UNO and the Western Liberal-Left apparently could care less about concentration camps in North Korea or mass murder and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and it sees no human rights problem in Cuba and instead supports its twisted dictator. It is the same Left that sees all evil as emanating from the Free World and primarily the United States and Israel, and would do anything but applaud the murder of “imperialist” Israelis by “oppressed” heroes like the Palestinians. It reposes its faith in the UNO, where Syria, Libya, China and North Korea enjoy seats on the Human Rights Commission.

Europe spawned the ideologies of fascism, communism, and the socialist ideal of submerging the individual into society through crushing government power. These doctrines during the 20th century killed over 250 million people. Now France, Germany and their satellites are supporting terror. The US contrary to popular left liberal myth did not arm Iraq during the 1980s and 90s - that was done by the Russians and French. This is indeed true for all terrorist regimes now in operation today. The French have been the first and most active bankers of terror. Now the French are arming Iran, and using the EU and UNO to Palestinian terror, posing as the champions of the Arab and African world, and the leader of the anti-Jew, anti-American group. It is a ridiculous, sordid and immoral record.

This is why listening to Chirac and his EU colleagues espouse moral platitudes is nauseating. Maybe Western news outlets should start running documentaries on French perfidy and double-dealing and start analyzing who funds terror.

[For more information on Terror regimes a good interactive map can be found at: http://slate.msn.com/?id=115757