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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (130213)	4/28/2004 1:38:10 AM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 281500

Kofi Annan is UN's "Mr. Fix-It" Cause for replacement By Arnold Beichman If the United Nations were a public corporation, which, unfortunately it is not, the chief executive officer would resign in advance of being forced out by a responsible board of directors, which is what the U.N. Security Council is or should be. But members of the U.N. "Board of Directors" are themselves involved up to their ears in the UN's "oil-for-food" scandal. Were the U.N. a corporation, New York State Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer would have the whole lot of U.N. executives from Kofi Annan down under indictment. In light of Kofi Annan's failure to stop U.N. corruption in the supposedly humanitarian oil-for-food program, how can the Bush administration even think of entrusting a future democratic Iraq to U.N. supervision? And how can Mr. Annan even want to stay on as U.N. secretary-general of this corrupted organization? Claudia Rossett's spectacular expose in the current Commentary Magazine headlines the scandal: "The oil-for-food scam: What did Kofi Annan know, and when did he know it?" As Miss Rossett writes: "Annan's studied bewilderment is itself an indictment not only of his person but of the system he heads." To forestall congressional investigations into a multibillion-dollar U.N. scandal, Mr. Annan has just approved appointment of a three-man outside commission, headed by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, to look into the oil-for-food operation which, according to Miss Rossett, involved "bribes, kickbacks, fraud, smuggling." I can tell you the commission's findings in advance: First, they will agree that there were, indeed, crooks at the United Nations. Second, the commission will with a muted tut-tut absolve Mr. Annan of responsibility for the crimes committed under his nose. Not under investigation is Mr. Annan's appointment of Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian foreign minister, as the U.N. special envoy to Iraq. Mr. Brahimi began his assignment with a French radio interview in which he said "the biggest poison in the region is the policy of Israeli power and the suffering of the Palestinians." Mr. Annan's reaction? Recall Mr. Brahimi? Nah. Mild rebuke by Mr. Annan's spokesman who said senior U.N. officials shouldn't talk that way about a member nation. Perhaps Congress ought to ask the State Department if Mr. Brahimi is still the department's candidate for overseeing a future Iraqi government. If anything supports the view it's time for Mr. Annan to retire, it is the highway robbery in the 1996-2003 oil-for-food program run by the United Nations to help Iraq's 26 million people. This was a program in which, Miss Rossett writes, "Annan had a direct hand from the beginning." And the U.N. Secretariat controlled the bank accounts arising from the sale of Iraqi oil and had the sole power to release Saddam's earnings to pay for Iraqi imports. Here's how the scam worked: (1) Saddam sold oil at below-market prices to his chosen customers. (2) They in turn sold the oil to third parties at a fat profit. Part of the profit was kicked back to Saddam and paid into bank accounts outside the U.N. program and in violation of U.N. sanctions. (3) Saddam began smuggling out oil through Turkey, Jordan and Syria making a mockery of Oil-for-Food that was supposed to help the Iraqi people. This was reported in the press but ignored by the U.N. All this was known to Mr. Annan who brazenly in 2002 signed a letter to the Security Council authorizing use of $20 million from the Oil-for-Food funds to pay for an "Olympic sport city" in Iraq and $50 million to equip Saddam's "Ministry of Information." And what was Mr. Annan's answer to all this corruption, larceny, graft that was so injurious to the Iraqi people? At first, this artfully worded statement: "As far as I know, nobody in the Secretariat has committed any wrongdoing." Last March Mr. Annan grudgingly conceded, "It is highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrongdoing." That wrongdoing consisted in the U.N. Secretariat being "officially on Saddam's payroll" and collaborating with Saddam instead of, as was their duty, supervising him. Writes Miss Rosett: "[I]t was the U.N. secretary-general who compliantly condoned Saddam's ever-escalating schemes and conditions, and who lobbied to the last to preserve Saddam's totalitarian regime while the U.N. Secretariat was swimming in his cash. "We are left to contemplate a U.N. 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." Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times. washtimes.com