Time to pay the price for supporting Saddam

Some American politicians apparently want to let France, Germany and Russia get away with sabotaging the US-led effort to oust Saddam Hussein. Some even want to reward those countries as a "gesture" that America wants to "make amends" for the hard feelings over Iraq.

Those politicians – including some prominent Republicans – are upset that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wants to punish countries that tried to save Saddam, by barring them from competing for $18 billion in primary Iraq reconstruction contracts funded by the US taxpayers.

President Bush, despite reports that he thought the timing unfortunate, is standing firmly behind Wolfowitz and his policy statement – even as former Secretary of State James Baker readies to ask the countries that bailed out the Ba’athist regime with over $100 billion in loans, to forgive part of the debt.

In reality, Wolfowitz’s timing was perfect. He has given Baker the perfect negotiating position: the French, Germans, Russians and others can either forgive most of Iraq’s Saddam-era debt now and start to earn back Washington’s good graces, or they can lose it all in case oil-rich Free Iraq chooses to default.

Such an American-brokered bargain would be unduly generous to the likes of Jacques Chirac, his socialist minion Gerhard Schroeder, and their KGB colonel ally, Vladimir Putin.

Their governments pushed bad loans to bad people. They bet on the wrong horse. Their diplomatic shenanigans may have cost American lives. Now it’s time for them to pay.