By Matt for the TIB Network:
Let me educate the fine folks at the Guardian who think that the UN Oil for Food scandal is the same thing as allowing two countries to violate the sanctions. Here's the article (via the WMD Mailbag - note to my correspondent: The Guardian email didn't include a direct link to the story; for the record, that sucks.) in case you want to read along.The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman's mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the UN is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organisation. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN's oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.Nice try...what the author has done is cherry pick some comments out that don't really address the Oil-for-Food program. Volcker is saying that the Oil for Food program wasn't the primary source of funding for Saddam's regime. No news there as nobody said that it was...
"The major source of external financial resources to the Iraqi regime," he reported, "resulted from sanctions violations outside the [oil-for-food] programme's framework." These violations consisted of "illicit sales" of oil by the Iraqi regime to Turkey and Jordan. The members of the UN security council, including the United States, knew about them but did nothing. "United States law requires that assistance programmes to countries in violation of UN sanctions be ended unless continuation is determined to be in the national interest. Such determinations were provided by successive United States administrations."
Hyde has been around a LOT longer than this guy gives him credit for...he isn't staking his career on any UN scandal. Coleman just got there for crying out loud, what career is he staking?
The government of the US, in other words, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq. The biggest source of illegal funds to Saddam Hussein was approved not by officials of the UN but by officials in the US. Strange to relate, neither Mr Hyde nor Mr Coleman have yet been bellyaching about it. But this isn't the half of it.Somehow this is America's fault. Weren't the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and the UN aware as well? Why is this author singling out American politicans? Contrary to what the author says, the UN apparently DID approve of Jordan's and Egypt's smuggling operations...unless the author thinks the UN was ignorant of those events. Again, what to make of the author not including the other countries who knew...
This is really what the author wants to talk about:
Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.We KNOW what the deal is with Oil for Food...and are learning more everyday. The difference between these two "stories" is that we don't actually know for sure what happened to the nearly $9B. The problem, as I recall, stems from the fact that coalition commanders had access to spend what they felt was needed where they felt it was needed once the reconstruction efforts started. That's a terrible way to run a business, but it was effective in getting things going on the ground. It does, however, open up the possibility that a few bad apples skimming some money...
The authority, the inspector general found, was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management". This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.
Also note that while the author has no problem naming the UN Oil for Food critics, he has a difficult time coming up with the name of the guy in charge of the CPA... L. Paul Bremer (I'm being pushed to write why I think Bremer and Gen. Franks are responsible for the "post-war" period).
This, by the way, is the THIRD story in this story...the author is trying to confuse you by throwing whatever he can at the wall to see what sticks.
