WASHINGTON

Why do you suppose France and Russia - nations that for
years urged the lifting of sanctions on oil production of
Saddam's Iraq - are now preventing an end to those U.N.
sanctions on free Iraq?

Answer: the Chirac-Putin bedfellowship wants to maintain
control of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, under which
Iraq was permitted to sell oil and ostensibly use the
proceeds to buy food and medicine for its people. (In
reality, Saddam skimmed a huge bundle and socked it away in
Swiss, French and Asian banks.)

Iraqis now desperately need all that the country's oil
production can buy. But Jacques Chirac cares little about
reconstruction of basic services; he is more concerned
about maintaining U.N. control - that is, French veto
control - of Iraq's oil.

"Sophisticated international blackmail" is what Senator
Arlen Specter called it yesterday. Blackmail is the apt
word: unless the U.S. and Britain turn over primary control
of Iraq to the U.N. - none of this secondary "vital role"
stuff - Chiracism threatens to hobble oil sales and prevent
recovery.

This extortion is greeted with hosannas by the thousand or
more U.N. employees and contractors involved in the present
oil-for-food setup, many beholden to France for their jobs.
And so long as the U.N. bureaucracy handles the accounting,
it is as if Arthur Andersen were back in business - no
questions are asked about who profits from the sanctions
management.

My Kurdish friends, for example, who are entitled by U.N.
resolution to 13 percent of the oil-for-food revenues,
believe their four million people are owed billions in food
and hospital supplies. I wonder: in what French banks is
the money collected from past oil sales deposited? Is a
competitive rate of interest being paid? Is that interest
being siphoned off in "overhead" to pay other U.N. bills?

Colin Powell apparently believes that Chirac's new fondness
for sanctions could tie up Iraqi oil production with
litigation for years. His advice to President Bush is to
pay the ransom but nibble away at the sanctions with
limited resolutions. I think we should confront the
extortion scheme head on and let Chirac use his veto to
isolate France further.

What other money trails need to be followed? Few doubt that
vast Iraqi assets have been secretly transferred out of the
country for years, and especially in the prewar months.
This is done through cut-outs, phony foundations, numbered
accounts, intelligence proprietaries, leveraged currency
speculation through proxies in unregulated hedge funds and
a hundred other financial devices. Taken together, Saddam's
huge haul is now terrorism's central bank account.

This kind of money moves not in satchels but over wires.
Needed to root it out is a financial Javert. Bush and Tony
Blair should create a task force of the best computer
sleuths at Treasury, the exchequer, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the Fed, Interpol and the Bank of
England to ferret out the hidden billions that belong to
the Iraqi people. (Here is how Admiral Poindexter can find
gainful employment.)

Start with the 200,000 barrels a day of Kirkuk oil that
Iraq smuggled to Syria, an illegal pipeline flow ignored by
the U.N. but stopped recently by Secretary Rumsfeld.

Then follow the money: We know that President Bashar Assad
turned an ophthalmologist's blind eye to Saddam's use of
the Syrian port of Tartus to import missile fuel components
from China and night-vision goggles from Russia. In return,
Saddam sold Syria oil at a bargain price - say, as little
as $5 a barrel. That adds up to more than a billion bucks
over a few years in Saddam's personal pocket, placed -
where?

Money recaptured from the Thief of Baghdad should be used
to build new villages for those Arabs he transferred north
in his campaign to ethnically cleanse Kirkuk of troublesome
Kurds. That would allow a peaceful return of Kurds to their
ancestral homes without displacing Arab or Turkmen
families.

And here's the way the government of New Iraq can save some
of the money it now loses by Russia's eager participation
in blackmail in the Security Council: Declare that the $10
billion owed by Iraq under Saddam to Russia for unused
tanks and planes will be repaid on the day Vladimir Putin
repays the debt incurred by Russia under the czars.