France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of
peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of
Baghdad make that plain. But we are on the side of TotalFinaElf. Twice
in recent columns, Diane Francis has mentioned, almost en passant, a
curious little fact:
The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is
France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business
as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote
in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is
Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime
Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter."
Let's see if I've got this straight: TotalFinaElf's largest
shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp, whose co-chief
executive is Jean Chrétien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais. Mr. Desmarais'
brother, Paul Desmarais Jr., sits on the Total board.
For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil,"
that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that
the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in
perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas
oilpatch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then
the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of
the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian Prime Minister -- that's
to say, his daughter, France Chrétien, and his grandchildren.
