Kofi and Saddam

A couple of good articles are out there today on the massive corruption at the UN. One from the Chicago Tribune:

In this week's burst of Oil-for-Food news:

- U.S. Senate investigators reported Monday that Hussein illegally pocketed some $21 billion during 13 years of sanctions--double prior estimates. Much of that came via Oil-for-Food, in which Iraq was allowed to sell some oil, supposedly under UN monitoring, and use the proceeds to buy food and medicine for its people.

Instead, as Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) accurately framed it, "That humanitarian program was corrupted and exploited ... for the most horrible and aggressive purpose" of funding Hussein's military. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who chairs a Senate panel aggressively investigating Oil-for-Food, said the huge fraud left a "dark stain" over the UN. While the UN averted its eyes, or worse, Hussein illegally smuggled oil, collected fat surcharges on permitted oil sales, bought rotting or substandard goods for his people, and even demanded kickbacks from foreign suppliers of those goods.

- As Iraqis died of malnutrition and disease, Hussein paid bribes to undermine sanctions and clear a path for spending on WMD. Mark Greenblatt, a counsel for the Senate panel, said Hussein tried "to gain influence throughout the world" for his campaign to end the sanctions. Greenblatt said Hussein "gave oil allocations to officials, journalists and even terrorists, who then sold their allocations to the traditional oil companies in return for a sizable commission." If some Hussein allies who criticized the sanctions as cruelties imposed on the dictator were gullible, others were purchased and paid for.

- Probers previously alleged that Benon Sevan, the sidekick of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who ran Oil-for-Food, secretly got lucrative rights to illicit oil from Hussein himself. On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that Sevan also blocked the UN's anti-corruption unit from investigating his program. The Post said Sevan, who denies wrongdoing, was "loath to antagonize key Security Council members, particularly Russia, which routinely opposed efforts to reform a multibillion-dollar program that served its political and economic interests." Translation: People like their bribes intact.

Hussein's hijacking of Oil-for-Food bought him a world of support--almost. Now, honorable governments need to demand accountability from the nations, companies and individuals that were complicit in his blood-caked crimes. The UN also must produce the records that will let probers unravel the corruption for which so many Iraqi innocents paid with their lives.

Even in history's rough draft, this scandal is contemptible. And for those who appeased Saddam Hussein, it will grow more embarrassing.

Another from the OpinionJournal is a stinging indictment of Kofi Annan:

But Mr. Annan's own official U.N. biography states that before becoming secretary-general, he "led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid"--and that implies a certain familiarity with the origins of Oil for Food.
Once Mr. Annan became secretary-general, he lost little time in getting deeply involved with Oil for Food. In October 1997, just 10 months into the job, he transformed what had begun as an ad hoc, temporary relief measure into the Office of the Iraq Program, an entrenched U.N. department, which reported to him directly--and was eliminated only after the U.S.-led coalition, against Mr. Annan's wishes, deposed Saddam. To run Oil for Food, Mr. Annan picked Benon Sevan (now alleged to have received oil money from Saddam, which he denies) and kept him there until the program ended about six years later.

Mr. Annan's reorganization of Oil for Food meant a nontrivial change in the trajectory of the program. All the signs are that Saddam immediately took the cue that he could now start gaming the program with impunity--and Mr. Annan did not prove him wrong. Within the month, Saddam had created the first crisis over the U.N. weapons inspectors, who were supposed to be part of the sanctions and Oil for Food package. Mr. Annan's response was not to throttle back on Oil for Food but to go before the Security Council a few months later and urge that Baghdad be allowed to import oil equipment along with the food and medicine to which the program had been initially limited. This set the stage for the ensuing burst in Saddam's oil production, kickbacks, surcharges and smuggling.

Mr. Annan then flew to Baghdad for a private powwow with Saddam and returned to declare that this was a man he could do business with. The weapons inspectors returned to Iraq for a short spell, but by the end of 1998, Saddam had evicted them for the next four years. Mr. Annan, however, went right on doing business. And big business it was, however humanitarian in name. Under the Oil for Food deal, Mr. Annan's Secretariat pulled in a 2.2% commission on Saddam's oil sales, totaling a whopping $1.4 billion over the life of the program, to cover the costs of supervising Saddam. Yet somehow the Secretariat never found the funding to fully meter oil shipments, ensure full inspections of all goods entering Iraq, or catch the pricing scams that by the new estimates of Senate investigators let Saddam rake in $4.4 billion in kickbacks on relief contracts.

Mr. Annan and his aides would also have us believe that Oil for Food had nothing to do with Saddam's smuggling of oil--which generated the lion's share of his illicit income. But it was only after Oil for Food geared up that Saddam's oil smuggling really took off, totaling $13.6 billion during his entire 12 years between wars, but with more than two-thirds of that--an estimated $9.7 billion--earned during the era of Oil for Food. Those were precisely the years in which Mr. Annan repeatedly went to bat to enable Saddam, under Oil for Food, to import the equipment to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure, whence came all that smuggled oil.

Transparency from the start might have flagged the world and stopped the scams as things turned deeply rotten under Oil for Food. But Mr. Annan's policy to this day has been secrecy. On Monday, Sen. Coleman summed up his subcommittee's efforts to get at the truth, as having required so far, eight subpoenas, 13 chairman's letters, "numerous interviews with key participants, and receipt of over a million pages of evidence" to begin to understand "the behind-the-scenes machinations of the participants in the Oil for Food program."

It would be obscene if we ever sent another penny to this den of iniquity.