"Rush to Peace"davidwarrenonline.com - ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES And now, with the help, principally, of the leading suppliers of materials and technology for his illegal weapons programmes -- Germany, France, and Russia, in that order, according to material widely available in the European media -- Saddam has succeeded in reversing the onus. It is now taken for granted at the U.N. that the regime in Baghdad is not obliged to co-operate, except cosmetically, with U.N. weapons inspectors -- that instead the United States is obliged to prove the contrary of each Saddamite claim, no matter how intrinsically improbable the claim may be.