The last thing Iraq needs is the cheats of the UN
By Mark Steyn
Telegraph UK
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'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.
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 is 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.
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.
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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 is hardly his fault. When he set up the show, who would
have thought that one day there would be US auditors in
Baghdad? Why, it was, as Polly Toynbee would say, "unthinkable". |
