French and Russian Hypocrisy

[Drunk]

(Wall Street Journal)

French audacity has it charms, but sometimes even they get carried away. Consider President Jacques Chirac's transparently self-interested generosity yesterday in suddenly proposing that U.N. sanctions against Iraq be "suspended."

At least the French are figuring out that it doesn't look good for them to fight openly to maintain Saddam-era sanctions on newly free Iraqis. But in proposing merely to suspend, rather than lift, sanctions, the French also suggested leaving the U.N. in control of Iraqi oil revenues. A final lifting of sanctions would then have to wait for a clean bill of health from . . . Hans Blix and his U.N. weapons inspectors. Really.

At least the French are smoother spin-artists than the Russians, who don't even bother to conceal their Iraq agenda. "We are not at all opposing lifting of sanctions. What we are insisting on is that Security Council resolutions must be implemented," Russian U.N. Ambassador Sergei Lavrov asserted.

In other words, the two countries that did the most to erode sanctions against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship are now joined at the pocketbook in attempting to maintain them in some form on a newly free Iraq. They were only too happy to do business with Saddam. But now they're just as pleased to use sanctions as leverage to get some Iraqi affirmation of their odious debts and oil contracts from the Saddam era. If Iraqi redevelopment is held back in the meantime, so what?

The polite word for this is blackmail. And on Manhattan's east side, it doesn't hurt their cause that the corrupt oil-for-food program helps the U.N. itself (the 2% or so its bureaucracy skims off the top for "administrative" expenses) or that the U.N. is desperate to prove its own relevance in post-Saddam Iraq.

President Bush has for now delegated this thorny little problem to Foggy Bottom, which at least seems wise to the game. Sanctions should be lifted rather than suspended, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte said yesterday. But we hope Mr. Bush is also prepared to make a moral issue of the sanctions, and from the Presidential bully pulpit if need be.

Holding hostage the only major source (oil) of hard currency for a newly liberated people isn't exactly an attractive position. But the French and Russians may get away with it so long as the U.S. remains reluctant to rebut the idea that either its occupation in Baghdad or any new Iraqi government require any kind of U.N. imprimatur.

Mr. Bush could start by pointing out the extent to which the oil-for-food program served as little more than an instrument of Baath Party control. One reason American relief workers haven't been able to administer oil-for-food is because the Baath workers who previously ran it all melted away. General Tommy Franks's description of it as "oil-for-palaces" was entirely apt. The money intended for food and medicine went instead to finance, among other things, Uday Hussein's Olympic Committee. As this truth leaks out, even the French may find this hard to defend.

There is also a strong legal case to be made that the sanctions can simply be declared null-and-void, having been imposed on a regime that no longer exists. Russian oil companies and their lawyers are blustering that they will challenge any new oil sales. But the idea that it will be difficult to find buyers for Iraqi oil absent a U.N. seal of approval isn't credible; oil is a commodity and a slight price discount should find enough willing buyers.

The other U.N. game of the moment is to get Hans Blix and his U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq. No one should deny Mr. Blix a tourist visa, if he wants to see for himself the wreckage of Saddam's rule. But Mr. Blix has made clear his hostility to the war so many times in recent weeks that one suspects he has a vested interest in not finding the weapons he didn't find the first time around.

The search for chemical and biological weapons is also about future security even more than past vindication. Something happened to Saddam's stockpiles of anthrax and botulin toxin, and it's vital that the U.S. learn if they were destroyed or moved somewhere else. That news is likely to come from interviewing Iraqi scientists and generals, and the U.S. needs to get that information first before it gets to U.N. inspectors (and perhaps other intelligence services).

Having liberated Iraq, the U.S. has no reason to be defensive about removing the U.N.'s sanctions and oil-for-food chokeholds over the Iraq economy. As for the validity of Saddam's debts and oil contracts, that should be up to a new Iraqi government to decide. Once that principle is established and declared non-negotiable, French and Russian behavior is likely to improve in a hurry.