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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (162765)	5/26/2005 11:04:18 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks, but something is amiss here: Whatever the intentions of its planners, the Oil-for-Food program actually worked like this: Iraq designated certain individuals or entities as potential purchasers of Iraqi oil. It gave them oil "allocations" or "vouchers" (not foreseen in the program as designed by the U.N.), which they could either use to purchase oil themselves or sell to third parties. Because the regime severely limited the number of recipients of these allocations, the recipients were able to resell the oil after attaching a surcharge--usually between 3 and 30 cents a barrel. Sales were usually a minimum of 1 million barrels, so the profits from the surcharges were significant. Beginning in 1998, Hussein began to shift his allocations from oil companies to politicians, journalists, and terrorist groups. Mark Greenblatt, a lead investigator for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, described it this way. "His plan was simple. Rather than giving allocations to traditional oil purchasers, he gave allocations to foreign officials, journalists, even hostile terrorist entities, who then flipped their oil allocations to traditional oil companies in return for a sizable commission. In doing so, Saddam could give a foreign official or a journalist hundreds of thousands of dollars without ever paying a dime." If Iraqi oil was to be sold at market prices, then how could anyone trade the vouchers or the government impose a surcharge? It seems to me that somebody must have lobbied UN to buy the Iraqi oil at well below market prices. Do you have details on how the program was actually sanctioned and was suppose to work? Also, if Saddam was the decision maker as to who gets the oil on the cheap, how come America got to profit from his oil? One would think that Saddam would have allocated all the vouchers to Russians, the French, and PLO, no? Why was this not so?