Former French President Jacques Chirac passed away yesterday after a long illness. Many of the obituaries praised the French leader’s foresight for objecting to the Iraq war. “Jacques Chirac, French President Who Opposed U.S. Iraq War, Is Dead At 86,” read the NPR headline. CBS News titled their remembrance, “Jacques Chirac, former French president who challenged U.S. over Iraq war, dies at 86.”
Many outlets, motivated by their animosity toward the Iraq war, take Chirac’s opposition at face value. But was a desire for peace or foresight about the post-war difficulties really the reason Chirac broke with the United States and Great Britain ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq? No.
Chirac represented a generation of European leaders deeply corrupted by their dealings in the Middle East. In Chirac’s case, as detailed by French scholar Olivier Guitta, Chirac’s relations with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein started almost three decades before the Iraq war. As French Prime Minister from 1974 to 1976, it was Chirac who went to Baghdad to negotiate trade agreements as well as the Iraqi purchase of a French nuclear reactor (which was subsequently destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 1981).
Chirac and Hussein hit it off. While Saddam Hussein refrained from visiting Western countries, he made an exception for France, where Chirac greeted him “as my personal friend.” Chirac would often spend an evening in Baghdad with Saddam while traveling between Paris and Asia. Rumors abound, fueled by Saddam’s own threats to expose French politicians who accepted his largesse, that Iraqi donations helped fund Chirac’s run for the mayoralty of Paris.
France also enjoyed its position as chief arms broker for Hussein’s regime, selling the Iraqi dictator $25 billion in advanced fighters and missiles. After Chirac again became prime minister of France, he sought to convince the Iraqi leader to give French firms a contract to rebuild Iraq’s nuclear reactor despite Iraq’s ongoing war with Iran.
When Iraq was under international sanctions following its invasion of Kuwait, Chirac helped lobby Iraq for French firms to develop its oil fields. Successful, Chirac, now as France’s president, urged Western powers to loosen sanctions so that Baghdad could more freely spend its money. By the beginning of the 2003 war, France was Iraq’s chief trading partner.
That NPR, CBS, and other outlets ignore Chirac’s relationship with Saddam Hussein and omit mention of Chirac’s efforts to enrich French companies against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds is both troubling and dishonest.
It is unkind to speak ill of the dead, but it is crucial to understand the context of Chirac’s Iraq policy, if only because it typifies the European approach to the Middle East. Chirac-era France’s relations with Iraq mirror in many ways Tony Blair-era Great Britain’s relationship with Libya, or Angela Merkel-era Germany’s current relationship with Iran. For European leaders then and now, too often lofty rhetoric about morality obscures an immoral commercialism willing to profit off dictators and terror sponsors for the sake of the bottom line.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
