Posted on 10/07/2004 4:43:10 PM PDT by 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".
Great post and comments bump!
Exactly - excellent post!
I agree.
(1) Starting over and maybe (2) made up only of representatives of governments that are freely elected by their people (?).
The only problem with this is that someone like Saddam had an election and won 99.999996% of the vote (by coersion and illegal means, of course).
Good thoughts though.
I hope and pray that this is what brings the UN down...
Mama
Ditto...
The UN is much worse than "useless." It is the enemy of all national sovereignty. It is the enemy of the American Revolution. It is the enemy of the US Constitution. It is the enemy of our real allies (especially Israel). It is the enemy of the right to keep and bear arms. It is the enemy of unborn children. It is the enemy of parents. It is the enemy of the Church. It is the enemy of God Himself. THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!
Did you see that? 15 bil of aid, 100 bil of business...no wonder Saddam pretended like he still had wmd....much too profitable...
Said "independent agency" would itself be subject to the same corrupting forces that have taken the UN under sway. It's a sturctural problem: ultimate authority is inherently subject to corruption. The checks and balances of numerous poly-polar governments, each subject to the consent of the people, are the only antidote.
That precondition has yet to be satisfied. Going in the direction of a global authority of any kind is fraught with peril.
"The UN is as useful now as the League of Nations was after WWI."
Not true. The League was FAR more useful.
1) We didn't fund the League of Nations to the tune of billions of dollars.
2) We didn't subject ourselves to League of Nations jurisdiction on any level.
3) We didn't care much what the League of Nations had to say, period.
4) We didn't have the League of Nations on U.S. soil.
5) We didn't deal with any members of the League of Nations as if they were our equals because they were recognized by the League of Nations.
6) We didn't have to veto stupid actions by the League of Nations.
7) We didn't watch the League of Nations Secretary General get rich starving Iraqi children.
8) We didn't have to combat League of Nations funded terrorists.
9) We didn't have to watch our 'allies' use the League of Nations to block action in defense of freedom.
10) We didn't have to watch our enemies use their seats at the League of Nations to send hundreds of spies to the U.S. under diplomatic cover.
That's all I got so far. Got more?
Get the UN out of USA! I could use an international court against all involved in the oil-for-food scam.
The League of Nations wasn't organizing multilateral treaties designed to bring this country's resource industries to their knees (and the economy with them).
So-called Liberalism/Progressivism is nothing more than reverse social engineering where the enemies of the American Revolution promote "social action" that takes us back into the hands of the oligarchs that the birth of this nation secured many of us alive today against. It is the marketing of evil.
Who do the VIACOMMIES wine and dine with? Castro, a fellow treater of humanity as silly putty. I recall that Nation magazine in the rise of the Nazis proclaimed them, along with Lenin and Mussolini as part of the world community's answer to American capitalism. Some answer.
So what if the UN prostitutes children, so what if Sandy Berger steals and destroys documents from Top Secret national archives related to anti-American terrorists. So what if his "intellectually" volitional constituents (Chomsky, Moore, Rather, Brokaw, Jennings et al) support them too, and that includes their enablers, lest they protest any of that pesky labling.
"You have to wonder about folks who believe so strongly in nothing that they organize their lives around it." - James Taranto
ping
bttt
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).
No more UN for US-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
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