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An unusually clearly written column from the Massachusetts Daily Collegian (a liberal hell hole). Obviously, the writer is one of the tiny minority of conservatives at UMASS Amherst (Berkeley East). It gives me hope that some of the students actually have brains.

Here goes:

from http://www.dailycollegian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/04/21/4085c91da7bcb

No corruption for oil in Iraq

by Ben Duffy
April 21, 2004

Just the other day, a friend remarked to me, "If we went to war in Iraq for oil, why is the price of gas so high?" I chuckled at that one.

Yeah, seriously...nearly two dollars a gallon and rising. And some people are still running around with these ridiculous "no blood for oil" stickers on their cars?

Yes, Iraq and the oil trade are inseparable. Saddam built his 55 majestic palaces on oil money. Saddam's system was pretty simple. Iraq's oil supply belonged to "the people," meaning that it belonged to the government, meaning that it belonged to Saddam. Since the invasion of Iraq, there's been a change in policy. Now the oil belongs to the people, meaning that the profits raised from it will be put toward schools, hospitals, and other such institutions that Saddam felt were secondary to his constant palace building.

Well, that doesn't make sense though, does it? Iraq was crippled by trade sanctions throughout the 1990s, so just where did Saddam get his money? As it turns out, Saddam never got out of the oil business. Besides the vastly under-publicized desert pipeline that we found pumping oil to Syria, Iraq continued selling oil under the cover of the systematically corrupt U.N. Oil for Food Program. The United Nations doesn't even deny that the program was a fraught with cheating, and Kofi Annan has agreed to appoint an investigative panel to get to the bottom of the matter.

I once read an article about the devious little plan that Saddam crafted to get around the Oil For Food Program. It wasn't rocket science - he just resold the food he received to neighboring countries, and stuck the profits into his pocket. Packages of food clearly marked "not for resale" have been found on the shelves of grocery stores throughout the Middle East. The Iraqi people still went hungry, and the only people who benefited were Saddam and his European trading partners.

But there's a new twist to the story that I suspect will go largely underreported in the liberal media. Fraud at Haliburton was a huge story, but this one will probably not see the light of day. Investigators, led by Claude Hankes-Drielsma and the KPMG accounting firm have found solid documentary evidence of oil kickbacks secretly conducted under the Oil For Food Program. Saddam didn't pay off his buddies in Europe with cash. He paid them off with barrels of crude oil.

Mr. Hankes-Drielsma has said "based on the facts as I know them at the present time, the United Nations failed in its responsibility to the Iraqi people and the international community at large." He has since uncovered 270 recipients of oil kickbacks, and he estimates that one out of every six barrels of oil leaving Iraq was a gift to political allies. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a disproportionate number of Frenchmen on the list, including 12 million barrels to Charles Pasqua (former Interior Minister of France) and eight million barrels to Jean-Bernard Merimee (former French Ambassador to the United Nations).

The most interesting name on the list is the recipient of 72.2 million barrels: Patrick Maugein, European oil baron and close confidante of Monsieur Jacques Chirac. No, the prime minister of France doesn't not appear on the list, but the investigators have already aired their suspicions that Maugein was nothing but a go-between for Saddam and Chirac.

Lebanese-French middleman Elias Firzli, recipient of 14.6 million barrels of oil, admitted in an interview with Insight magazine that the Iraqis desperately sought an audience with Chirac prior to the war, and were willing to buy the attention of the prime minister if necessary. Firzli went on to say that he introduced Iraqi envoy Nizar Hamdoon to senior French officials in Paris.

The United Nations refused to back this war, due in large part to the veto-wielding French component of the Security Council. That much is historical fact. But if you think that the French were motivated by anything other than money, you need to pull your head out of your rear end. The French were quite content with the status quo, because Saddam was making some very powerful Frenchmen very rich.

Fundamentally, I would have to agree with the bumper sticker "no blood for oil." I just find it ironic that it usually appears right next to other stickers that say "no war" or "impeach Bush." Apparently these people are confused as to just whose blood was being shed, and who was buying the oil. Hundreds of thousands of people died at the hands of Saddam's brutal regime, and he managed to keep the United Nations off his back for years by buying off one of its permanent Security Council members. Keep that in the mind next time you see a sticker that says "no blood for oil."

Ben Duffy is a UMass student.