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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