FERRETTING OUT THE AXIS OF WEASEL

I've speculated a bit on the motivations behind French obstinance when it comes to war with Iraq. I believe their current position, that they will do everything in their power to avert war not by forcing Saddam's compliance but by thwarting us, is based on oil and the cheap supply of it they get from Saddam. In the past few years France has become Saddam's leading oil customer. In part, French obstructionism is also a result of its antipathy toward the US, rooted ultimately in its jealously of our position. To France, we are the "cowboys," the young upstarts who inherited the world in the ashes of World War II. To them, their culture is superior, their history more glorious, their cheeses smellier (on that last point, they're right). We're Johnny come latelys to them, without any right to the position we hold. Thus, when English words enter common usage in Paris, the French government bans them. When American companies try to do business in Europe, Paris puts up barricades, even nixing the GE-Honeywell merger a couple years back, a move that resulted in layoffs here in the US.

But there's more to the story. And Saddam's former bomb-maker, Dr. Khadir Hamza, lays it out: France wants to avoid invasion because in our victory its own role in Saddam's nuclear program will at last be exposed. France helped Saddam get the bomb, both before and after the Gulf War. If true, this is a huge story, and by itself reason enough for France to do what it has been doing.

According to Dr. Khidir Hamza, who ran Saddam's nuclear bombmaking program in the early 1990's, Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was built by the French. When the Israelis determined that the reactor's real purpose was to make nuclear weapons, they destroyed it in a 1981 bombing raid.

"From the moment Osirak was hit we knew we had to try another method to get the bomb," Dr. Hamza told the Washington Times in Sept. 2002.

The year before Dr. Hamza confirmed that the Osirak reactor was never intended to be anything but a nuclear bombmaking plant.

"I went to France in 1974 to buy a reactor, as a starting point, for a plutonium bomb," Hamza told the Carneigie Endowment in November 2000. "It was a long-range project. The reactor would be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); and the French would be there."

And even after Osirak was taken out, French assistance was critical to Baghdad's continuing plan to get nuclear weapons.

"Just before the Gulf War, the crash program was ongoing to make one bomb from the French fuel," Hamza told the Carniegie group.

"People were putting stock into that one bomb," he said. "They were afraid of even testing the bomb, because Iraq testing that one bomb would be like telling the world that we used the French fuel."

Dr. Hamza said that in 1990 Saddam ordered him to make a single nuclear device using materials obtained from Paris.

"We made a device, actually, minus the core," he told PBS's "Frontline" in Oct. 2001. "And we sat down and did calculations.... We would have had a small -- probably two-to-four kiloton explosion at the time..... But the idea was [that Saddam] wanted it on a missile, and he was mad at us for not making it small enough."

Axis of Evil, meet the Axis of Weasel. Somebody, get Den Beste a job in the State Department!