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USN: Oil-for-Food only part of larger French-Russian scheme going back to 1998
Wretchard reports a fascinating (no longer online) study by a US Naval Commander from Nov 1998 of how French surveillance planes and a French frigate tailed the US Nimitz task force responsible for U2 overflights of Iraq. Excerpt:

[In] the third part of a series of six entitled Five Fleets: Around the World with the Nimitz by Lieutenant Commander William R. Bray, U.S.N. ... Bray describes how the Nimitz [in November 1998] was taking part in a UN sponsored mission to contain Saddam Hussein. One of its tasks was to support a U-2 flight over Iraq that Saddam had threatened to shoot down. The U-2 was an American aircraft assigned to a United Nations mission. What Bray described next was how the French tracked the Nimitz task force almost certainly on behalf of Saddam....

The Russians [also] were ready to play their part. While the movements of the Nimitz and the rest of the Fleet were being reported by French warships, the Kremlin induced Saddam to retreat ever so slightly from the brink, but not all the way, leaving the Iraqi dictator with a net gain. They played the hero to the American heel. More from LCDR Bray:

As the Nimitz operated in the northern Arabian Gulf on the morning of 19 November, Russia's Foreign Minister, the crafty former KGB spymaster and accomplished Arabist Yevgeny Primakov, ... promised [Foreign Minister Tariq] Aziz they would work harder in the Security Council to get sanctions lifted, as long as Iraq immediately allowed all UNSCOM inspectors to return to work and complied with all existing resolutions. Baghdad accepted, and on 21 November the inspectors returned to Iraq, temporarily defusing the crisis.

The United States was being played like a fiddle, its huge fleet and aerial assets led in circles in the sham blockade that we now know was set up by 'friends' on the Security Council who were running a covert rearmament effort called the Oil-for-Food Programme. History may show that Oil-For-Food; the corrupt regime of UN inspections, the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation industry -- and much else -- were all of a piece. Future generations will be astonished, not at how terrible that September day in New York was, but at how lightly the US got off for the folly of the 1990s, escaping not so much through vigilance as sheer good fortune.
Say it again, Tom. In the middle east, the French and Russians are on the other side. The goal is to reduce the influence of the US hyperpower and step into any breach they can open up, regardless of the nature of the regime involved or the threat it poses to the west.

Posted by: lex 2004-12-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=50260