August 9, 2001 Commentary Indict Saddam By Michael Rubin. Mr. Rubin, a visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recently returned from nine months as a Carnegie Council fellow and visiting professor in northern Iraq's universities. Tuesday's U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq once again raise the question of why much of the international community continues to treat Saddam Hussein with kid gloves. When Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began his campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1992, after all, Europe did not respond by expanding trade with Serbia. Quite the opposite, it ostracized Milosevic and, in 1993, succeeded in pressing the United Nations to appoint a commission of experts to investigate his crimes. The judicial process was slow, but paid dividends. It took six years to indict Milosevic, and another two years to bring him to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Lucrative Contracts Contrast that experience with the approach to Saddam, a perpetrator of much worse human-rights abuses than Milosevic. Sadly, lucrative Iraqi business contracts appear to have precluded any European effort to indict Saddam for war crimes. Russia, for example, has earned more than $1 billion from Saddam under the oil-for-food programs, and has promises of several billion dollars more in future contracts once sanctions are lifted. And in the first four years of the oil-for-food program, France won $3.5 billion in trade with Iraq. Baghdad certainly doesn't award contracts based on quality: Of six Russian ambulances ordered for the town of Halabja, for example, five broke down irreparably within a month, complained local hospital officials. So what is Saddam getting in exchange? Maybe it's the votes of at least two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council against the creation of an international court to look into the Iraqi regime's war crimes. While working as a visiting professor at the University of Sulaymani in Western-defended northern Iraq this past year, I had occasion to witness the growing involvement of Western executives in Iraq. Mohammed Douri, Iraq's U.N. ambassador, recently told a reporter, "Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals. If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit." http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB997315471358281151.djm