The UN's war for oil
By: Tim Wood
Posted: '18-MAY-04 22:00' GMT © Mineweb 1997-2004
NEW YORK (Mineweb.com) -- The UN's corrupt Oil-for-Food programme necessitates a hindsight check. Given evidence of abuses quite early in the programme's existence, the US failed to run through its final option before embarking on a very expensive war.
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Had the administration merely "followed the money", it would have found Saddam Hussein's courage proportionate to the oil money he was skimming off Oil-for-Food. Matching that were the motivation for French, Chinese and Russian recalcitrance on enforcing UN resolutions concerning Iraq. The tyrant was cosseted and indirectly funded by the UN bureaucracy and sympathetic Security Council members who did a roaring trade in Iraq. Perversely, the very means of punishing Saddam came to help him survive and prosper.
The US has done the right thing the wrong way, or at least too soon.<font size=3>
How much cheaper it would have been for Colin Powell to use his February, 5 2003 intelligence briefing before the UNSC to train the spotlight on the venal Oil-for-Food programme. <font size=4>The diagrams, photographs, videos and tapes would have been far more interesting and revealing had they shown Saddam's cronies trading oil at the al-Rashid hotel, or UN staff turning a blind eye to illegal surcharges on oil, or money sloshing about in foreign bank accounts, or tankers smuggling oil, or illicit French and Russian weapons imports, or fake companies selling fake goods to Iraq.
The Bush administration had the tiger by the tail.
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Resolution 1441 should not have been directed toward Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but to the Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP). The OIP should have been given one last chance to clean up its act or have UN Headquarters exiled away from New York to a patch of moose pasture in North Dakota, hard up against the Canadian border (whereupon its staff would have shrunk by four-fifths).
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Had the US applied its military buildup to aggressively policing the oil-for-food scheme, it would have soon choked off most of Saddam's cash flow and in so doing neutralized several threats. Not the least of those threats are pseudo super-powers recklessly challenging American hegemony. An American led blockade would have had the usual suspects bawling about the inhumanity of it all even as they winked at the next shipment of missile motors or Saddam's umpteenth palace built with baby formula money.
The Iraq War was indeed about oil, but not the one the mainstream media likes to trumpet. The war capped the fountain of money that rained down on a proliferating anti-freedom league. In the case of the UN and Saddam, never truer was the saying: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
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The US would be no less reviled whatever it did, and there is still no reason to care what the centuries old bloc bourgeoisophobe thinks or feels. However, as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has noted, grand strategy also requires simple cost-benefit analysis. Oil-for-food was left out of the equation. A costly oversight.
If President Bush is short of a regret about the war, oil-for-food is one to bookmark although the elites would be paralyzed with indignation to hear it.
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Not all is lost.
A thorough investigation of UNSCAM, as oil-for-food has been appropriately dubbed in the blogosphere, could still be very profitable. There are humiliations to dish out and reparations to impose. Unfortunately, the haggling in Baghdad between US envoy L. Paul Bremer III and Ahmad Chalabi over parallel investigations is not helpful. Nor does the White House's silence on the matter offer much comfort.
We can surely rely on Paul Volcker and his investigators, who spared no sacred cows in tackling Swiss culpability for Nazi looting, to bring justice to an unaccountable institution.<font size=3>
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