Last I checked, Ollie North sold weapons to Iran, not Iraq.
Second, we in the US have to admit that we made the European bed that we're now "sleeping" in. By providing a blanket of security over Europe for the past 59 or so years, we've allowed countries like France, Germany and others to turn into vast bastions of peaceful co-existence types. They've had really nothing to fear for over half a century and it's taken its toll.
Where you can fault the French, Germans, Russians and others - basically everyone who opposed our invasion, is that they've been very willing to deal with a known scumbag to make a buck. As long as the UN sanctions were in place, Hussein didn't have to pay millions of dollars in war reperations to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and he could continue to use the UN Oil For Food program to offer oil futures to his "friends" in various European governments. Also, he was still selling millions of barrels of oil illegally on the black market. Under that arrangement, he didn't have to pay millions that he owed, plus he could buy weapons and support from Europe and have plenty of money to build palaces and live grandly. Over the years the people of Iraq learned to adapt and created their own black markets to meet their needs, albeit on a limited scale.
This was also a great deal for the French, who loaned millions of dollars to Iraq to buy jet fighters from Dassault and other heavy weapons, with these loans being secured by (most likely) Oil For Food futures (I think that will be an interesting finding when the investigations are done). This was one of the prime motivators for French resolve against us... Hussein was personally responsible for the loans, and if he was ousted those loan agreements would become null and void, and the French economy is in bad enough shape as it is. So they ahd to look out for their interests.
Yes, the US supported Hussein with money and turned a blind eye to the Soviets selling him everything under the sun, but that was because Iraq was battling Iran, which to us was a greater evil at the time. The French, Germans, and Russians were dealing with Hussein for one reason - money. Even after the Gulf War and the revelations of all the evils that Hussein had committed, these countries still lined up to make deals that were at the least morally questionable, and at the highest illegal. Maybe you can see these motives as the same, but I can't.
Are you referring to the Camp David Accords, that didn't amount to a hill of beans and got Anwar Sadat assasinated?
