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drew · 09-17-2002, 09:46 AM

Europe's pusillanimous response to the prospect of renewed military action against Iraq is actually easy to understand. Visit any "NATO capital" and you'll find a place overrun with refugees from former colonies, pervasive political, economic, and spiritual exhaustion, government beset by internal EU bickering, and fragile left-of-center political coalitions agreeing on little other than curbing U.S. influence.

Euro-business leaders are afraid of losing their exclusive "Axis of Evil" cookie jar where they operate sans American economic competition. "Nobody in Germany or Continental Europe agrees with Bush," Holger Friedrich, a fund manager for Frankfurt-based Union Investment GmbH, said recently, as his firm purchased Iranian bonds that will fund the radical Islamic theocracy in Tehran. Britain's Aberdeen Asset Management Trust has invested in Iraqi and North Korean debt. "It's toxic stuff," admits Colm McDonagh, an Aberdeen fund manager, "but when it moves, it really moves."

In 1997, Total SA, a French oil company with permanent suites at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, struck a $2 billion natural gas contract with Iran. On the occasion, then-Premier Lionel Jospin applauded this triumph of French enterprise. "American laws apply in the United States," he sneered. "They do not apply in France."

The timorous grandchildren of those who tried to appease Hitler have other worries. They do not savor the prospect of U.S. intelligence teams roaming at will through the records of Saddam's WMD - weapons of mass destruction - factories and exposing Europe's complicity in building these arsenals. After the first Gulf War, Kenneth Timmerman chronicled in The Death Lobby Saddam's success in gaining the help of foreign corporations and governments in building his storehouse of ABCs - atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.

Little has changed. French engineers helped build the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981. To this day, the French hold $4 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. German firms specialized in providing poison gas and missile technology. W. Seth Carus, a senior research professor at the National Defense University, noted a decade ago, "Everything that showed up in Iraq - chemical, biological, nuclear - had a German element in it." And Saddam's "Supergun," the long-range, nuclear-capable cannon that was almost operational during the Gulf War, was produced by companies from seven different European countries.

09-17-2002, 09:46 AM
drew Confirmed User Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: us Posts: 336	Europe's pusillanimous response to the prospect of renewed military action against Iraq is actually easy to understand. Visit any "NATO capital" and you'll find a place overrun with refugees from former colonies, pervasive political, economic, and spiritual exhaustion, government beset by internal EU bickering, and fragile left-of-center political coalitions agreeing on little other than curbing U.S. influence. Euro-business leaders are afraid of losing their exclusive "Axis of Evil" cookie jar where they operate sans American economic competition. "Nobody in Germany or Continental Europe agrees with Bush," Holger Friedrich, a fund manager for Frankfurt-based Union Investment GmbH, said recently, as his firm purchased Iranian bonds that will fund the radical Islamic theocracy in Tehran. Britain's Aberdeen Asset Management Trust has invested in Iraqi and North Korean debt. "It's toxic stuff," admits Colm McDonagh, an Aberdeen fund manager, "but when it moves, it really moves." In 1997, Total SA, a French oil company with permanent suites at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, struck a $2 billion natural gas contract with Iran. On the occasion, then-Premier Lionel Jospin applauded this triumph of French enterprise. "American laws apply in the United States," he sneered. "They do not apply in France." The timorous grandchildren of those who tried to appease Hitler have other worries. They do not savor the prospect of U.S. intelligence teams roaming at will through the records of Saddam's WMD - weapons of mass destruction - factories and exposing Europe's complicity in building these arsenals. After the first Gulf War, Kenneth Timmerman chronicled in The Death Lobby Saddam's success in gaining the help of foreign corporations and governments in building his storehouse of ABCs - atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. Little has changed. French engineers helped build the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981. To this day, the French hold $4 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. German firms specialized in providing poison gas and missile technology. W. Seth Carus, a senior research professor at the National Defense University, noted a decade ago, "Everything that showed up in Iraq - chemical, biological, nuclear - had a German element in it." And Saddam's "Supergun," the long-range, nuclear-capable cannon that was almost operational during the Gulf War, was produced by companies from seven different European countries.