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U.N. Oil-for-Food Programme Funding: The programme is funded exclusively with proceeds from Iraqi oil exports, authorised by the Security Council. In the initial stages of the programme, Iraq was permitted to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months, with two-thirds of that amount to be used to meet Iraq’s humanitarian needs. In 1998, the limit on the level of Iraqi oil exports under the programme was raised to $5.26 billion every six months, again with two-thirds of the oil proceeds earmarked to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people. In December 1999, the ceiling on Iraqi oil...

Powell non-committal as Europe demands UN Iraq role BRUSSELS, April 3 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell faced near unanimous demands from EU and NATO states on Thursday to give the United Nations a key role in postwar Iraq but did not spell out how Washington would share power there. Powell said the United Nations should be a partner in running Iraq after President Saddam Hussein is overthrown but that the United States and Britain should lead the transition from a military administration to an Iraqi-run government. European Union and NATO leaders came out of a series of...

An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. (Full text of the leaked document here).In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered "unhelpful and directed against the United States." They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be "harmful to the UN." Greenpeace has been actively lobbying at the United Nations against the war, and many delegates have expressed both publicly and privately their distaste for what they see as US...

By now, Mike Farrell probably figures he’s got the nation fooled. For over 20 years, the Hollywood actor turned peace activist has flawlessly played the part of the pacifist patriot with America’s best interests at heart. Farrell is quite convincing when he’s in character, as he has been since he propelled himself to the forefront of the Iraq war protest movement. Without batting an eye, Farrell will tell you how much it would pain him to see Iraqi or American blood spilled in the unjust war on Iraq. Farrell is counting on the fact that no one remembers another part...

BAGHDAD, April 3 (Reuters) - Iraq's foreign minister attacked the U.N. secretary-general on Thursday and said he had helped the U.S.-led invasion in which he said some 1,250 Iraqi civilians had been killed since March 20. "We have now more than 1,250 civilians killed and 5,000 injured all over the country since the beginning of the war," Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told Reuters in an interview in Baghdad's central Palestine hotel. Sabri accused U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan of doing nothing to stop the war and said he had actually facilitated the invasion by U.S. and British troops two weeks...

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. -- Former U.S. Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern is opposed to the invasion of Iraq, as he opposed U.S. participation in Vietnam when he was a first-term senator from South Dakota. McGovern spoke at the Town Hall Interpretations lecture in North Platte, Neb., Tuesday. He said he is not a pacifist, but thinks it would have been better to give arms inspectors another six months to seek the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Now that the war is on, McGovern said, he hopes it is for the best. The decorated World War II bomber...

WASHINGTON, April 2 (AFP) - US officials should divide the labor and expense of rebuilding postwar Iraq, modeling their efforts on the current reconstruction of Afghanistan, the top Democrat in Congress said Wednesday. "Afghanistan serves as a reasonable model," Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle told reporters, saying that while the reconstruction of Afghan society and infrastructure is US-led, "you've seen a lot of other countries step up to the plate." He made his comments as US politicians increasingly focus on the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and its expected astronomical costs. Some US legislators have noted that many members of the...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday there is ``lots of unhappiness'' about the U.S.-led war against Iraq at the United Nations and that Arab nations would like to see greater U.N. efforts to bring about a cease-fire. Once the fighting stops, he said he wants U.N. weapons inspectors to resume their work and test any weapons of mass destruction that might be found. He also said ``it is not excluded that the U.N. will play an important role'' in post-conflict Iraq. Asked whether the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found diminished the impact...

Blix doubts Iraq would use banned weapons - paper BRUSSELS, April 1 (Reuters) - Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix doubts that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction -- if it has them -- against British and U.S. forces fighting in the country, a Belgian newspaper reported on Tuesday. Blix told Le Soir in an interview that if Iraq had such weapons, "I doubt very much that they would use them because this war has gained them a certain amount of sympathy in the world, which would turn against them if they used chemical arms." Blix, who oversaw the...

“If you lay down a resolution,” asked President Bush, “does it mean anything?” At the Mayport Naval Air Station in Florida, on Feb. 13, Bush said that if the United Nations did not enforce its own resolutions on disarming Iraq it would “fade into history as an ineffective irrelevant, debating society.” Yet, as U.S., British and Australian forces enter the second week of their campaign to enforce the resolutions that the UN wouldn’t, there was still debate in Washington, D.C. on whether the UN should be given a role in administering post-war Iraq. In a House subcommittee, Secretary of State...

OTTAWA -- The United Nations is a "farce" that needs to be reformed, according to Lord Conrad Black. Speaking on Canwest's Sunday Global yesterday, Black said, "A huge proportion of the membership countries are just petty despots that have no civil policy at all." Black ripped the UN for its recent failure to back the United States in its bid to overthrow the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and rid that country of weapons of mass destruction. "We have seen what a demeaning farce the whole business of rounding up votes in the Security Council is. Whoever happens to be...

All arguments against the war--including mine--are moot now. The decision has been made, and our job is not to nurse misgivings but to win in Iraq. Compared to what occurred 62 years ago, the anti-war movement in the United States is scanty and timorous. In 1941, it was of enormous influence. The ''America First'' movement was based in this city, and its rallies featured the hero Charles Lindbergh and Sears Roebuck tycoon retired Gen. Robert Wood, among others. The movement extended throughout the nation and included young John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. But Dec. 7 brought an end to all...

A United Nations body has chastised the B.C. Liberal government for its treatment of public sector unions, saying laws that stripped teachers of the right to strike and imposed contracts in education, health and community services violate international agreements. In a decision released Thursday, the Geneva-based International Labour Organization (ILO) called on the province to repeal the law declaring K-12 education an essential service and amend five other statutes to ensure working conditions are negotiated rather than imposed. But Premier Gordon Campbell said he has no intention of making such changes. "We said in the election we were going to...

UN Chief Arms Inspector Announces Retirement Stewart Stogel Thursday, March 27, 2003 Hans Blix To Leave UN July 1 New York--United Nations--"My contract expires at the end of June and I do not propose to stay beyond that," said UN Chief Arms Inspector Hans Blixi in an interview with NewsMax Thursday. Blix's intention to call it quits later this year first surfaced in a NewsMax Insider Report earlier this month. Blix joined the UN in March 2000, after serving as Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN atomic watchdog) for 17 years. Before he left the IAEA in...

UNITED NATIONS, March 27 (AFP) - It is too early to say whether Iraq has chemical or biological weapons, chief United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix said Thursday. Blix told reporters that "everybody will be relieved" that such weapons had not been used in the first week of the US-led war on Iraq. Asked about the discovery by US troops of protective suits and antidotes to chemical weapons in Iraq, Blix replied: "Everyone knows that they were importing atropine... "One would have to wait for more solid information" before drawing any conclusions, he said. Blix recalled that he said before...

<p>UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations walked out of a debate on the Iraqi war Thursday after Iraq's ambassador accused the United States of trying to exterminate the Iraqi people.</p> <p>"I did sit through quite a long part of what he had to say but I'd heard enough," U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said.</p>

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations on Thursday rejected a call by eight countries including Russia and Syria to examine the human rights and humanitarian situation in Iraq as a result of war. An Iraqi delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights immediately condemned the decision, saying it was a "dark day" for the organization because Iraqis were "suffering psychological torture." The 53-state forum is holding its annual six-week session in Geneva as U.S.-led forces push ahead in their week-old invasion of Iraq. [snip]

Arab nations at UN scrap plan to demand end to war By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Arab nations, sensing they lack the votes, scrapped plans to ask the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq, diplomats said Thursday. "It does not look good," one Arab diplomat said, speaking of the odds a resolution would gain the nine "yes" votes and no veto required for Security Council approval. Calling for a vote, only to see a resolution defeated, would risk legitimizing the U.S.-British invasion after the fact, the envoys said....

LONDON, March 27 (AFP) - Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi spoke out Thursday against a major role for the United Nations in a post-war Iraq. Chalabi, who heads the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC) umbrella opposition group, said in an interview in the Daily Telegraph newspaper: "The UN is too weak to deal with de-Baathification (getting rid of the ruling Baath party), the destruction of weapons of mass destruction" and the dismantling of President Saddam Hussein's security services. "The UN would be hamstrung. Iraq is far too big and important," Chalabi said. "The UN's record on Iraq has been abysmal...

So, so many contradictions appear before us in our time that it is hard to always follow clearly the line intended to let us know what is going on. There are many who scoff at Operation Iraqi Freedom and decry the U.S. for moving against the wishes of the UN Security Council and of the many nations, few of them democracies, that opposed the invasion and now stand against the war itself. Yet the moment such people talk as though the UN is a vaunted organization representing the last best hope for international cooperation and humane concern, I wonder what...