UN Complicit in Corruption of Iraq’s Oil-for-Food Program
The international community responded with an oil-for-food program administered by the United Nations intended to provide essential food and medicine for the Iraqi people.
Saddam's abuse of this program, ridiculed as "oil for palaces," was well-known. While Iraqi children suffered from malnourishment, Saddam and his sons built ever more elaborate residences.
What hasn't been fully understood was the extent of the program's corruption, the degree to which top-level UN employees were complicit in Saddam's fraud, how much money Saddam skimmed from the program and to whom he paid some of it.
The mainstream media have almost completely ignored details of that corruption confirmed by independent investigations conducted by the United States Treasury Department and the Iraqi Governing Council.
From 1997 through 2002, oil-for-food generated $67 billion US for the Iraqi regime that, according to a study by Nile Gardiner and James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, Saddam was allowed to spend with little oversight from the United Nations.
The program sold Iraqi oil at below-market prices, which benefited the recipients of oil contracts, and overpaid for Iraqi imports, which benefited Iraqi suppliers. In return, Saddam demanded and received kickbacks from both groups.
The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates Saddam generated $10.1 billion US in illegal revenues from oil smuggling and kickbacks on oil sales through the oil-for-food program. Documents discovered at the Iraqi oil ministry indicate some of the program's beneficiaries.
A partial list of 270 "contractors" published in the Iraqi al-Mada newspaper in January include: French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, former French ambassador to the United Nations Jean-Bernard Merimee, the Communist parties of Russia and Ukraine, the "director of the Russian president's office," the son of the Syrian defence minister and an antiwar member of the British Parliament.
At this point, those implicated by the al-Mada list have either denied the list's accuracy or, if accurate, any wrongdoing.
Shaker al-Kaffaji, an Iraqi-American identified as a recipient of a contract worth seven million barrels of Iraqi oil, contributed $400,000 US to produce In Shifting Sands, a documentary by former arms inspector and war opponent Scott Ritter critical of U.S. policy in Iraq.
Between 1996 and 2003, Russian firms did $7.3 billion US and French firms $3.7 billion US in business under oil-for-food. At the United Nations itself, Assistant Secretary General Benon V. Sevan, executive director of the oil-for-food program, is listed as receiving 11.5 million barrels of oil.
Sevan is taking an extended vacation in advance of his retirement later this month.
Kojo Annan, son of Secretary General Kofi Annan, worked as a consultant for the Swiss company Cotecna until shortly before it was awarded the lucrative UN contract to authenticate goods shipped into Iraq under oil-for-food. Neither the UN nor Cotecna acknowledged this conflict of interest.
The further one peels back the oil-for-food program, the more corruption emerges.
The attendant impact of that corruption on Security Council votes, media coverage and initiatives to keep Saddam in power cannot be overstated.
Beyond Gardiner and Phillips and their colleague Helle Dale at the Heritage Foundation and Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal, few Americans have taken an interest in the fetid innards of the United Nations and the oil-for-food program.
Under pressure from recent congressional hearings, the wheels of accountability are slowly, reluctantly beginning to creak at the United Nations, the "legitimate" body to which John Kerry, congressional Democrats, European and Arab leaders want the United States to relinquish the rebuilding of Iraq.
That accountability must be complete, the malevolence of the oil-for-food debacle fully revealed before the United Nations is given the opportunity to mangle Iraq again.
Two parties especially deserve a thorough inquiry into the oil-for-food program's misdeeds: the United States, the single largest contributor to the United Nations whose soldiers are being killed in part by insurgents funded by the illicit proceeds of oil-for-food; and the Iraqi people, the program's intended beneficiary.
The antiwar left has claimed that the liberation of Iraq, like the liberation of Afghanistan before it, was motivated by American greed, by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's ties to the oil industry reflected in sweetheart deals for corporate friends.
The emerging details of oil-for-food reveal precisely the opposite: Many of those opposed to Iraq's liberation were bought and paid for by Iraqi oil in a corrupt program sanctioned by the United Nations
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