In her run-up to Wednesday’s Volcker Committee mega-report on oil-for-food — Exposé, At Last? — Claudia Rosett is skeptical that the investigation will prove anything more than a grandiloquent whitewash. It’s hard to argue with her – and I won’t (not that I would even want to). She certainly has the early evidence (the report preface) on her side, not to mention the attitude of Kofi’s recent interview with his friends at the BBC. Claudia describes that event this way:
In a BBC interview released this week, Annan expressed regret that the U.N. ever engaged in administering relief for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “Honestly, I wish we were never given that program, and I wish the UN will never be asked to undertake that kind of program again.”
Annan seems to have forgotten his own role in urging from 1997 on that Oil-for-Food become not cleaner, but bigger and ever more directly managed by his own secretariat. It was Annan who picked as head of the program his longtime colleague Benon Sevan, the U.N. lifer who Volcker has already charged with taking bribes from Saddam. It was Annan who stocked his list of special advisers with two men now embroiled in Oil-for-Food investigations, former French ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee and Canadian tycoon Maurice Strong.
Nor does Annan even now seem to have learned the real lessons of the Oil-for-Food trainwreck. The same BBC interview brought us Annan pushing his pet proposal that the rich nations of the world give an automatic 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product for aid, much of it presumably to be funneled through the United Nations. Such amounts would run into the hundreds of billions, dwarfing even Oil-for-Food, and through the same fingers that Annan piously assures the BBC he wishes would never touch such lucre again. And like Oil-for-Food, which drew its funding straight from Saddam’s oil revenues, this plan for relief would generate vast sums without any need for the U.N. to justify why it needs every dollar – which is once again, a recipe for corruption.
After all the scandal, all the investigating by Volcker, and all the passionate words about reform, the likely product of this report is Volcker chastising but excusing Annan, and Annan excusing himself, on grounds – as he told the BBC this week – that “I don’t think any institution can go through the scrutiny, the scrubbing we’ve gone through and come out squeaky clean.”
Ah, treachery! as the late Ross Thomas would say. Claudia’s cynicism certainly seems justified.
But wait. Ironically, the AP, of all places, appears to be taking the whole thing more seriously. Maybe this report will have some teeth. Their Nick Wadhams summarizes:
The preface of the report makes four broad recommendations:
_Create the position of a chief executive officer, to ensure hiring decisions are based on talent rather than “political convenience.”
_Establish an Independent Auditing Board to fully review U.N. programs and hiring.
_Seek more effective coordination between U.N. agencies.
_Make sure the U.N. Security Council is clearer about the purpose and criteria for U.N. operations that it authorizes.
Sounds good at first glance, doesn’t it? But something rather obvious is missing, something even rudimentary intelligence would tell us is the sine qua non for battling and ending corruption – simple economic transparency… permanently opening the UN’s books for the citizens of the world who pay for it.
It’s not there.
Oh, well.
ìThe same BBC interview brought us Annan pushing his pet proposal that the rich nations of the world give an automatic 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product for aidî
Such aid would inadvertently be a disaster for the citizens of the Third World. They instead need a commitment by their governments to free market economic policies and liberal democratic principles. Providing free food, shoes, etc. often serves to destroy the precarious employment of those working in these sectors. Such well meaning altruism often backfires and causes more harm than good. “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!” implores economist James Shikwati:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
Yep . . . more bureaucracy, just what we need. Not. I think one of the things that will really make this bite is to require that the accounting books be open for examination, on demand, by any country who is a member of UN. After all – they are paying dues, right? So shouldn’t they be able to see at a glance just how effective the dues are being used?
And I wholeheartedly agree that it’s time to move away from simply giving people everything they need. Yes, there will always be proverty. But we should empower people whenever possible. When they have tools to make their lives better, it makes them feel more confident and more invested in whatever solutions they come up with to improve their living standard.
The message that the UN is operating as something other than a legitimizing band of third world thieves and despots will be delivered by a flying pig.
Roger:
Iget it. Kofi regrets ever taking on the oil for food program and hints that the U.N. was not up to it but wants to institute a program that deals with a far greater amount of money and that includes all the countries in the world instead of a portion of them. I can’t handle a dinghy, but I want to command that battleship. Brilliant!!
Roger:
This is another example of why Bolton is so important to have as the U.S. rep at the U.N. The powergrab that the U.N. is trying to begin will not stop at their GDP taxing plan. Eventually they will try to eliminate the U.S. Security Council Veto. Much as the E.U. is slowly eliminating sovereignty in Europe the U.N. is starting the same process.
This investigation will not reveal much because of the desire to protect the people most at fault – the 661 Committee that had oversight over the program. The majority of the staff personal of the 661 committee were from the United States and the United Kingdom.
The report is expected to blame every UN organ involved in the program — particularly the 15-member Security Council, meant to supervise it and the UN relief agencies involved in turf wars.
But the report is not expected to come up with any further information against Annan personally, although it will probably fault his son Kojo, for using his father’s name for personal profit in purchasing a Mercedes under diplomatic cover. (Big deal.)
Every contract in this program was referred to the Security Council’s 661 Committee particularly the US and UK members who had the accounting staff to examine the details. The United States had veto power over every contract issued.
The limited UN bureaucracy did not have the authority or the manpower to examine the contracts and reject them. This was the responsibility of the 661 committee.
The UN staff flagged 70 transactions as probably fraudulent in the referrals to the 661 committee.
“The United States and Britain, along with the other members of the UN Security Council, designed and oversaw the oil-for-food program,” wrote Harvard’s John G. Ruggie in the International Herald Tribune. “The United States alone had 60 professionals review each of the 36,000 contracts awardedómore than twice the size of the UN oil-for-food office’s professional staff. America and Britain held up 5,000 contracts, sometimes for months, to ensure that no technology was getting through that Saddam could use for weapons purposes. But they held up noneónot a single solitary oneóon the grounds of pricing irregularities, even when alerted by UN staff.”
The contracts that were held up included desperately needed children’s antibiotics because the US felt that would also protect Saddam’s military. There were reports in the media of contracts being rejected just to jerk Saddam around.
Despite its criticisms, the report will say that the program, which provided a lifeline for some 90 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people, had some “real accomplishments.”
The same may also be said of the Iraq “free-fraud zone” we created under the CPA where the corruption is expected to dwarf the Oil-For-Food scandal. Similar to the previous scandal the US is refusing to investigate the US companies accused of extreme corruption. Since the independent investigation has commenced of the UN program one of the three people indicted is a Houston businessman.
Were Saddam, Uday and Qusay and their families hurt by the 12 years of sanctions? I think not. Were US companies profiting from this corrupt program as well as French and Russian? Of course.
Who was most responsible for not investigating the fraud? Probably the US as it had the largest staff overseeing the program.
Easter,
You are obviously someone I can do business with,a contract is a piece of paper,not the reality.There were genuine contracts with bogus front companies,goods shipped as one thing but in actuality being something else.Every consignment would have to be examined,a colossal undertaking,impossible by any standards.
When you are dealing with people who are trickier than a barrel load of monkies,forget it.
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