By Jacques Chirac. I'm chiraced, just...errr...shocked.

...Chirac was defending something quite different when he sent his erstwhile foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, around the world to buy votes against America at the United Nations. Chirac was determined to maintain Saddam Hussein in power so that two extraordinarily lucrative oil contracts, negotiated by the French, could go into effect...

...during the first seven years alone, it would earn the French around $50 billion. Elf-Aquitaine negotiated a virtually identical deal with Saddam to expand the gigantic Majnoon oil field as well. Put together, those two deals were worth $100 billion to the French. That’s 100 billion good reasons for Mr. Chirac to keep Saddam in power.

This is particularly amusing (or pathetic), in light of this perspective about the hypocrisy and contradictions of the administration's critics:

For most of late 2002 and early 2003, many of these same critics decried America's supposedly imperial obsession with the petroleum reserves of the Middle East. Our war with Iraq ("no blood for oil") was emblematic of American machinations to steal a nation's natural treasure or at least rig the circumstances of its exploitation. And then suddenly war came. In victory, Iraqi oil was put under the transparent auspices of the Iraqi people — even as some surrounding Gulf sheiks were furious at American efforts to bring not dictatorship but democratic reform to the Middle East.

The result? The price of gas skyrocketed, in part because at least some Gulf OPEC autocratic states vented by cutting production. America was shown in fact to have had little influence concerning, much less any control of, the very petroleum that lay beneath the country it now occupied and had bled for. Suddenly Mr. Kerry and other senators decried not the worry over petroleum theft but the spikes in energy prices, demanding redress from the administration. Apparently Mr. Bush, the one-time unilateralist who had turned a deaf ear to Arab entreaties and had been too tough with Arab regimes, now suddenly was not unilateral enough with such greedy despots. Indeed, he was to be condemned for not confronting those about oil whom he had already "unnecessarily" once confronted purportedly over oil.

Rand,

I wonder how many billions of dollars US companies
made from oil deals in Iraq back when he was our pal
in the Middle East. Back when we were protecting
him and overlooking his atrocities (and provoking
him to attack his Islamist neighbors in our stead)....

I love the smell of hypocrasy in the morning.

You mean before the sanctions were in place, Jonathan?

You can wonder all you like Jon, but do I smell presumption? Did you check?

Bush-haters' Article of Faith #4,782,390: "Every bad government ever to rise anywhere, was established and propped up by the United States. Every bad thing those governments do is under orders from the CIA."

It apears that smell Mr Goff is referring to emanates from his own person.

Mr. Goff must be referring to that Persian country to the east. The one that violated every rule of diplomacy by storming our embassy and holding 52 Americans hostage for over a year while Democrat Jimmy Carter, a nice guy but out of his depth as President, fumbled around and did nothing. I'm sure we will leap to defend someone who has just urinated in our coffee. There is no evidence we provoked Saddam. He didn't need provocation to do anything.

The HYPOCRISY is accusing us of a war for oil with no proof and giving the French a pass when there are enough vouchers and contracts to paper the Louve.