France, Germany & Russia cheer Saddam ouster, but Wolfowitz says they should ‘pay’

Faced with having been on the losing side in Iraq, France, Germany and Russia now say they’re happy Saddam Hussein is gone.

None, of course, congratulated the United States, Britain, Australia or Poland, whose people had done all the work. In fact, they’re plotting to undermine the US and the UK.

“France, like all democracies, is delighted at the fall of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and hopes for a quick and effective end to the fighting,” proclaimed the office of President Jacques Chirac.

“With the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, it is a dark page that is turned and we are delighted,” added Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, licking the bruises of his failed half-year effort to save the Ba’athist regime.

Said Germany’s socialist Chanceller Gerhard Schroeder, “The important thing now is to make a political profit out of a probable and welcome victory.”

His foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, immediately urged the United States and Britain to hand their victory over to the United Nations. Germany reportedly opposes a leading role for NATO in Iraq.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country had armed Saddam Hussein to the hilt and had cut multibillion-dollar oil deals with the regime, broke a day of silence to applaud the Hussein regime’s collapse, while sniping at the US and Britain. He accused the US of provoking a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Iraq.

Putin is hosting a tripartite summit of losers in Russia. Warned the pro-Chirac ex-premier Alain Juppe, “The summit must not look like a show of anti-Americanism.”

Of course not. We all know what their real agenda is.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has the right idea. France should “pay some consequences” for its actions – and Russia and Germany can help Iraqi recovery best by writing off their multibillion-dollar debts.