Oil for Food?

The story unfolds. 'Tis believed the French receieved ~2 billion in oil vouchers from Saddaam and the Russians benefitted $10 million or so in similar ways. It's not new that the French or Russians were chummy with the Iraqis. Russians were providing weapons to Iraqis in Iraq until we told them we were going to attack and to get the hell out of there. Saddaam was also paying families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 a pop.

One of the more interesting things I heard today came from a new CIA report, which said Iraq had the oportunity to have some of the U.N. sanctions lifted against them in 1996, but Saddaam chose to be uncooperative with them, in essence, "to hold his own people hostage." Otherwise, with lifted sanctions, Saddaam would have lost some control over the Iraqi people. This came from, I think one of the CIA directors in charge of the WMD investigation, who has been in Iraq gathering intelligence from Iraqis where this oil-for-food thing unfolded. Before leaving Iraq a couple of weeks ago, he was in a car attacked by a suicide car bomb but survived while two others in his vehicle were killed.

Something else interesting. I was watching a SNL re-run from 2000 when Clinton was president and on Weekend Update, Colin Quinn was discussing how Clinton was threatening to take military action if Saddaam would not cooperate with U.N. weapon inspections. I was much younger then and not really interested in politics and was never aware the extent to which Clinton had become involved.

The main thing i want to say is that I wish Jacques Chirac would shut his f'n mouth. He came out with a new statement today denouncing the war and he has no ground to stand on when intelligence points to Chirac's foreign minister and the French National Bank taking kickbacks from Saddaam and getting 2 bil. out of this scam.