THE U.N. NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED (Mark Steyn)

MarkSteynOnline ^ | 10/7/04 | Mark Steyn

[MarlboroRed]

Don't take the word of your lazy rolling-news update anchor or the AP rewrite guy on the Duelfer findings on Iraq. Instead, read the report for yourself. It is an amazing document. It renders John Kerry, on foreign policy and national security, either a complacent fool or an utter fraud. It's not about WMD, it's about the top-to-toe corruption of the entire international system by Saddam Hussein. The "global test" is a racket, and anybody who puts faith in it is jeopardizing America's national security. If the lazy US media won't pick up this story now, shame on them. Here's what I wrote six months ago, in The Sunday Telegraph of April 25th:

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking.

No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya, nor the UN cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa, nor UN complicity in massacres, but some misty Unesco cultural event compered by the late Sir Peter Ustinov featuring photogenic children of many lands.

So the question now is whether the UN Oil-for-Food programme is just another of those things that slip down the memory hole, and we all go back to parroting the lullaby that "only the UN can bring legitimacy to Iraq/Afghanistan/Your Basket Case Here". Legitimacy seems to be the one thing the UN doesn't bring, and I'm not just talking about the love-children of UN-enriched Balkan hookers in Kosovo.

The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan's Secretariat.

In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody's guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN's own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

Where did all the other billions go? According to Kofi Annan himself, some $31 billion went on other "humanitarian" spending for Iraq. Such as? Well, in 2002, the Secretary-General expanded the programme to cover other "humanitarian" categories such as "sport", "information", "justice" and "labour and social affairs".

In Iraq, "sport" meant Uday's rape rooms, and "justice" meant a mass grave out in the desert, but that's not to say there weren't attendant expenses involved. So Kofi himself directly approved such "humanitarian" items as $20 million for an "Olympic sport city" (state-of-the-art rape rooms) and $50 million for Iraq's Ministry of Information (Comical Ali's office).

As the US Defence Contract Management Agency's report put it after the liberation, "Some items of questionable utility for the Iraqi people (eg, Mercedes-Benz touring sedans) were identified". The Jordanian supplier of school furniture had to be let go on the grounds that he didn't exist.

At the UN they were taken aback by this impertinent auditing by US government agencies. At Enron, you have to run the books past Arthur Andersen. But at UNron you don't need to hire even a ledger clerk. That total of $46 billion - 15 for food, 31 for Ba'ath Party interior decorating - is Kofi's best guess, and he expects us to take his word for it.

True, he approved some scrutiny. All Oil-for-Food shipments into Iraq had to be inspected - initially by Lloyd's Register of London, but in 1998 they were let go and replaced by a Swiss company, who had on the payroll a consultant by the name of Kojo Annan, son of Kofi. Hmm.

So far all this is just UN business as usual - venal and wasteful, albeit on a larger scale than ever before. But even by their own revolting standards the UN crossed a line.

A programme created to allow the world to constrain Saddam appears to have become instead the means by which Saddam constrained the world. Oil-for-Food gave him a free hand to reward well-connected French and Russian suppliers. He ran the programme by selling cut-price vouchers for Iraqi oil to politicians and bureaucrats, which they could then offload on the world markets at the going rate.

Among the alleged beneficiaries were senior French politicians and Russia's "office of the President". According to documentation found in the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, recipients of Saddam's generosity included the man Annan picked to run Oil-for-Food, the UN under-secretary-general Benon Sevan, who got enough oil to make himself a nice illegal profit of $3.5 million.

In other words, Oil-for-Fraud is everything the Left said the war was: it was all about oil - for Benon Sevan, the UN, France, Russia and the others who had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power. Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny, but Saddam can use Kofi Annan's office as a front for a multi-billion dollar global kickback scheme and, until it was brought to public attention by the tireless Claudia Rosett of The Wall Street Journal and a few other persistent types, the Secretary-General apparently never noticed.

Mr Sevan has now returned to New York from Australia. The lethargic Aussie press had made little effort to run him to ground because the notion that lifelong UN bureaucrats could be at the centre of a web of massive fraud at the expense of starving Iraqi urchins is just too, too "unthinkable" for much of the media.

So the conventional wisdom stays conventional - that we need to get the UN back into Iraq. No we don't. Iraq deserves better than an organisation which spent the last six years as Saddam's collaborator. As Claudia Rosett put it, "We are left to contemplate a UN system that has engendered a Secretary-General either so dishonest that he should be dismissed or so incompetent that he is truly dangerous and should be dismissed."

He should be, but he almost certainly won't be. After all, it's hardly his fault. When he set up the show, who'd have thought that one day there would be US auditors in Baghdad? Why, it was, as Polly Toynbee would say, "unthinkable".

[rodguy911]

We need to drop out of the UN and stop funding it.

That should assure it's demise. Take away the

gravy and the crime-dogs will disappear.

But,we need to start our own UN. We need an

organization of countries that are "our" allies,

"true" allies, even if we can count them all on one

hand. No more UN BS.

[rodguy911]

Good thoughts Bill.

[okie01]

I shall not give up on the idea of the UN, because I think that something like it is needed, but in its current form and under its current miasma of corruption I cannot find a single reason to defend it.

Well said.

If something like the UN is ever tried again, membership should be earned and invitational. It's not enough to simply "declare independence" from a colonial master. One must also establish a society predicated on individual freedom and the right to own property.

[JoeSixPack1]

Keep your friends close and your enemy's closer.

Walk away from the UN. Pull every single diplomatic provision specific to the UN from every lawbook in the land.

When their first tax bill arrives payable to the NYC Board of Revenue, we'll have an empty building in heavy need of repair. Not to mention a choice opportunity to regroup with the good guys of the world and try again.

[GW and Twins Pawpaw]

You wrote:

The u.n. is as useless as teats on a boar hog.


Well said, my friend...

[GW and Twins Pawpaw]

You wrote:

If something like the UN is ever tried again, membership should be earned and invitational. It's not enough to simply "declare independence" from a colonial master. One must also establish a society predicated on individual freedom and the right to own property.

And no encumbrances on the God given right of self defense!!!!!

[foreshadowed at waco]

The "global test" is a racket

The self-righteous Left thinks that all of their most sacred cows are indeed sacred--but they are all about money...abortion is a money making industry...over $1 billion a year...no wonder they oppsed sonograms for poor women...welfare and food stamps are a racket aided and abetted by the poverty pimps in the minority community...lots of double dipping and food stamps for sale on the street...the environmental movement is about trial lawyers and social engineering more than about the land and the people...as my mother used to say "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

I am especially pissed about the UN creeps who force poor children in Africa to give up sex in exchange for food...Lord help us...boys and girls often orphans being exploited and often infected with AIDS...BTW where's Al I love my people Sharpton...too busy getting paid by the Dems to scare up the vote, I guess.

[jimfree]

Ceded sovreignty is ceded sovreignty. Empowered bureaucracies are corruptible bureaucracies.

[Helms]

"IMHO the reason why the Left or Tranzis have made an issue of Halliburton may have been to try to draw a parrell with the UN scam, SHOULD THE SCADAL BE FOUND OUT

THIS MUST NOT STAND.

I have also felt that the hatred for Israel is because she will allways be a nation-state (ANATHEMA) and is Judaic. Amtisemetism is a good tool for Elites in realizing their Transnational Progressivism. Perhaps antisemitism has been used to advance their goals in abolishing the Nation-State and advance the Tanzis agenda.

"If the new hatred of George Bush is the natural expression of an elite that blurs truth and fiction, word and deed, then anger at a powerful America itself also is explicable in terms of the postmodernist paradigm. Because to the intellectual architects of the modern Left, the overdog automatically forfeits morality, the United States is in a particularly unenviable position as the world’s hyperpower. No absolute standards or recent history are necessary to place the mistreatment of prisoners in a proper context—not when televised pictures flooding our screens from Abu Graib show beefy, white uniformed Americans and poor, thin naked Iraqis. American misdemeanors of sexual humiliation and degradation by rogue soldiers and negligent officers are no different, as Senator Kennedy pointed out, from Saddam’s systematic efforts to institutionalize mass murder."

-vdh

[cmiller623]

The US should not send any contributions to the UN until there is a full accounting by a reputable Big 4 accounting firm of all dollars spent. Since the US funds over 70% of the UN budget, things would get straightened out quickly. Kofi Annan needs to go.....

[okie01]

And no encumbrances on the God given right of self defense!!!!!

None whatsoever.

[Ichneumon]

The u.n. is as useless as teats on a boar hog.

If they were only "useless", they would be harmless. Unfortunately, the UN is vastly destructive.

[Ptarmigan]

Don't forget that is was the Rockefellers who gave land in Manhattan to the UN. The UN should be abolished.

[Dilbert56]

Can't Congress address this right now. Introduce legislation to withold all dues and cooperation until the books are opened wide. Set a deadline for our withdrawl if they don't comply. Send them a bill for the blood and money we lost in Iraq because they wouldn't stand firm.

Make all our representatives vote on it before the election.

[lepton]

bookmark bump

[Inge C]

I just hope that if Bush is elected, changes will be made, and that all of us petition to get these bastrds out of our country, and built a 'true' UN with only those who have assisted us. It makes me very agnry knowing that these bastards are being paid by all of us, to continue their corruption, and their anti-merican rhetoric.

[goldstategop]

The liberals worship the UN. As a result, the mainstream media will print and air nothing that could discredit their "precious." Mark Steyn right; the OFF program shows us the UN is about anything but securing international peace and security; in reality it was a welfare and public relations program for Saddam Hussein. Don't count on AP or your evening news anchor person to highlight the truth that damns the Kerry/Edwards ticket.

[Mercat]

Makes you wonder who else was bought off.

[crazycat]

Your all missing the point, this story is errupting everywhere.

It is without a doubt the most outlandishly disgusting story of modern times and will not die.

It also leaves 'Effin vulnerable to merciless attack, due to his cretinous belief in the UN et al.

[Tax-chick]

Dang.