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".
Thanks for the ping!
Yes, the league of nations did not develop the UNs particualr version of communism called sustainable development. Sustainable development is now inculcated in every federal and most state agencies in the nation. Furthermore it is being pushed into the local level with local Agenda 21, smart growth, community plan and land use planning by viewshed, scenic view and watershed management.
The UN cannot be remade into anything that will not harm the US. As long as there is an organization with power over us that is populated by a majority of countries run by communists, dictators, socialists and other enemies of freedom, the United States should not take part.
PING
At your service!
Why would anyone even want to salvage it?
The UN isn't "useless", it's "dangerous"!
I'm not sure they would. But as I said, I do think that something on the order of the UN's original charter, which was essentially a meeting-place for discussion and consensus, would be extremely useful in a world with this very peculiar geopolitical alignment.
But the original charter was quickly forgotten in a rush of enthusiasm for world government by a self-proclaimed elite. At some point the emphasis was less on discussion and consensus and more on rule, and I cannot imagine what would have happened had the UN been given possession of all the nuclear weapons in the world or its own independent armed forces, both of which options were at one point more or less seriously discussed.
It is ironic that those who are at present pouring barrels of ink into lamenting that the U.S. is attempting to rule the world seem so insistent on effecting precisely that on behalf of an unelected, unaccountable, and provably corrupt UN. I suppose it's natural enough for a forum full of world leaders to expect to lead the world, and by extension, for a forum full of dictators to expect to be able to dictate. But that was never part of the deal.
As to why we should have a UN at all, there are a dozen cogent reasons for forming it in the first place that still apply. For one, it performs a point for coordinating disparate nations' aid efforts in time of natural disaster. For another, it should (although it does not at the present) constitute a neutral venue for parties in dispute to settle their differences short of war. For a third, it should constitute a means for collective efforts between nations to be coordinated on issues which should properly not fall under the direction of any individual nation - eradicating a disease, for example.
But not rule. And not a dinner table at which all the diners order their hearts' desire and pass the tab repeatedly to the same guy. And not a means for those who desire power to assume it without earning it and without being accountable to those over whom it is exercised.
I like the way you write, and admire your obvious intelligence and earnestness. I also agree with much of what you said. However, I disagree that there is any useful role for "a UN." I hit an absolute brick wall when I saw the phrase "collective efforts." No thanks.
I love Mark Steyn...he always nails it.
As usual, Steyn hits it out of the park.
Maybe Kofi was hoping to be King of the World, instead he is a snake in the grass, along with the other worthless folks that would take bribes.
UN is worthless, why is it here?
John F. Kerry's hopes for being elected president depend upon the thin thread of the President's determination to be polite. Thus far the Oil for Fraud (good term) program has largely been kept out of the US propaganda organs. If the President were to blow the lid off it by, for example, bringing it up in a nationally, nay globally televised debate, Kerry would be left without a leg to stand on.
This could actually happen. Duelfer's report went rather far afield to include documentation of UNron's (another great term) involvement in the Greatest Fraud In History. I don't think it would have been included with out the Presiden't approval, perhaps even his direction. It's in the report. There's no reason to bring it up when the Dork starts talking about the allies tonight. I don't really expect this to happen because nothing this dramatic ever seems to happen when you expect it. But it could.
Here's some more food for thought. There's been talk of an October Surprise. I've been wondering why there was so much bribery of French, German, Russian, and even British elements but there was so little bribery of prominent Americans. What if there WAS bribery of Americans? What if a certain individual who is a horse-faced DORK was on the list of Americans paid to oppose the war?
Probably not true since he voted for the authorization. But man would that be sweet.
In this world of instantaneous communications I'm not sure it's necessary to have a forum for the Globe to come together and debate the issues of the day.
I'm more and more convinced the UN is Antichrist and must be destroyed.
It is my humble opion that the un is a harbenger of evil on earth! It will be dealt with when the BOSS [read as Jesus] comes back! We must try to hold our heads together and keep to our beliefs and true to GOD's word.
In the name of the poor, the media supports socialist dictator agendas that caused killing of millions in the last century. Why would they stop now?
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