While Hired to Make Powdered Milk for Iraqi Children, French Arms Company Built a Chemical Weapons Factory for Saddam

Michel Josserand was fired from Thalès (formerly Thomson) in 2004

explains Hervé to non-French speakers as he comments a TF1 news article.

He now accuses his former company of having installed a vast corruption system in France and abroad. He talks about a Thalès lawyer who validated a vast bribery system in a lot of countries. "There are 2 kind of countries: those where bribery is unavoidable (Africa, Korea, Greece, Italy) and those where you can do business without tampering (several European countries, North America, Australia, NZ). And France? It depends on local and national political interests."

In foreign countries, he relates Operation Miksa, a bribery system in order to deliver security devices to Saudi Arabia. But this system was diverted in order to deliver chemical weapons to Saddam as Iraq suffered the UN the embargo of Oil-for-food program.

According to Weaselistan, the opposition to Iraq liberation was, as Shiraq said, "because a good friend has to tell when you're wrong. There are no WMD..." etc.

Banana Republic? Who said Banana Republic?! I want names!

Here is an excerpt from the the TF1 article:

A l'étranger, il cite l'opération Miksa de fournitures de matériels de sécurité à l'Arabie Saoudite, "un pays où il n'est pas possible de faire des affaires autrement" que par le recours aux montages financiers et aux intermédiaires, soutient-il. Michel Josserand soutient que son ancien employeur [fabricant d'éléments de bombes à fragmentation] "a détourné le programme en livrant des munitions chimiques" à Saddam Hussein alors que l'Irak était soumis à un embargo décrété par l'ONU dans le cadre de l'opération "Pétrole contre nourriture".

Meanwhile, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme write in Le Monde that

M. Josserand, qui a aussi dénoncé une fraude aux fonds européens, un contrat suspect passé avec la direction générale de l'armement (DGA) et des malversations dans le cadre de programmes d'aide au développement au Cambodge et au Togo, affirme également que Thales a contourné l'embargo onusien pour livrer du matériel militaire à Saddam Hussein. Le groupe, via sa filiale THEC, aurait permis au régime irakien de s'approvisionner en armes chimiques à la fin des années 1990.

As for a factory officially designed to make powdered milk for Iraqi children, it really served to build chemical weapons for the Ba'ath party.

Now what is it, among other things, that members of French society (at all levels, from top leaders to common citizens) have been bashing America and/or members of the Bush administration for all along?

• For not putting (enough) faith in the United Nations, in multilateralism, and in the international community
• For imposing an embargo which, in and of itself (no other possibile causes, such as a régime involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of its own people [and whose ministry of information (sic), incidentally, released the information in the last part of the present sentence]), caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (thank god for European-built factories designed to make, among other things, powdered milk for Iraqi children)
• For believing (how silly they are, what treacherous liars they are) that Saddam was involved with weapons of mass destruction (such as chemical weapons)

That is what members of the French élite said, praising the nation's inborn lucidité as well as its natural propensity for peace (indeed, castigating the war for being about hidden interests while lauding themselves for principles of the highest, and the most praiseworthy, order), and that is what members of the society parroted, celebrating Dominique de Villepin and often adding comments such as

Je n'aime pas Chirac, mais au moins il a eu les couilles de tenir tête à Deubeliou

Ignoring the facts that their leaders did not similarly have the balls to resist (i.e., they kowtowed to) the Beijing dictatorship (the matter of resistance was never raised, let alone entertained) and that their fellow principled pacifists have been trying to trying to resume weapon sales to same (having, truth to tell, no interest in opposing China at all) — is it unfair to say that "les Français ont tenu tête aux Américains but they gave head to the Chinese"? — the French (of all levels, from top leaders to common citizens) will dismiss this as très certainement a deplorable matter but one which should not put the basic tenets of their country's policy into doubt.

And their response (their automatic response, unfortunately) to this news item will be silence or character assassination (why are you putting so much importance in this matter?) or how the sins of Uncle Sam are, in any case (and always), worse.

And then they wonder why we don't believe that it's all (and only) about Bush and that the double standards can hardly be indicative of anything but anti-Americanism.