Indict Saddam
Steve Schear
schear at lvcm.com
Thu Aug 9 00:13:27 PDT 2001
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
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