February 26, 2004
OIL-FOR-FOOD/CASH-FOR-U.N. (via ef brown):
A New Job for Kay: Let him investigate the U.N. Oil-for-Food scam. (CLAUDIA ROSETT, February 25, 2004, Wall Street Journal)
When David Kay recovers from his weapons hunt, there's another Iraq-related quest I'd like to send him on. It's time a top intelligence team went scavenging for the real numbers on the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Program--that gigantic setup through which the U.N. from 1996 through 2003 supervised more than $100 billion worth of Saddam Hussein's selling of oil and buying of goods. [...]Basic integrity in bookkeeping seems little enough to ask of the U.N., where officials defending Oil-for-Food have been insisting that it wasn't their fault if Saddam was corrupt. They just did the job of meticulously recording the deals now beset by graft allegations, approving the contracts, and making sure the necessary funds went in and out of the U.N.-held escrow accounts. I'm sure there was some sort of logic to it. Though I have begun to wonder if maybe the same way the U.N. has its own arrangements for postal services and tax-exempt salaries, U.N. accounting has its own special system of arithmetic.
It all added up fairly neatly, of course, in the summary offered by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when the U.N. turned over the remnants of Oil-for-Food to the Coalition Provisional Authority in November. Oil-for-Food, said Mr. Annan, had presided over $65 billion worth of Saddam's oil sales and in buying relief supplies had used "some $46 billion of Iraqi export earnings on behalf of the Iraqi people." (Keep your eye on those numbers.) In doing so, the U.N. secretariat had collected a 2.2% commission on the oil, which, even after a portion was refunded for relief operations, netted out to more than $1 billion for U.N. administrative overhead. The U.N. also collected a 0.8% commission to pay for weapons inspections in Iraq--including when Saddam shut them out between 1998 and 2002--which comes to another $520 million or so.
The keen observer will see that this adds up to payouts of just under $48 billion from Saddam's Oil-for-Food proceeds, which is about $17 billion less than what he took in. The difference is explained--near enough--by the $17.5 billion paid out of the same Oil-for-Food stream of Saddam's oil revenues but dispensed, under another part of the U.N. Iraq program, by the U.N. Compensation Commission to victims of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That gives us a grand total of $65 billion earned, and about $65 billion allocated for payments, all very tidy.
Except the U.N. Compensation Commission states on its Web site that oil sales under Oil-for-Food totaled not Mr. Annan's $65 billion, but "more than US$70 billion"--a $5 billion discrepancy in U.N. figures. A phone call to the UNCC, based in Geneva, doesn't clear up much. A spokesman there says the oil total comes from the U.N. in New York, and adds, helpfully, "Maybe it was an approximate figure, just rounded up."
OK, but in some quarters, if not at the U.N., $5 billion here or there is big money.
Did anyone who opposed the war not have a financial stake in Saddam's survival? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 26, 2004 2:28 PM
No. A friend of mine who works for some lefty non-profit organization explained to me that he was aginst the war becuase it was taking much-needed funding from lefty non-profits like the one he works for. "So essentially," I said, "You're against the war for the same reason that you say President Bush is for the war: you both want to line your pockets. Where's the liberal altruism?" The discussion went downhill after that. But my point stands that all the liberals are freaking out over all the government bucks going to Iraq instead of keeping them in their phoney-baloney jobs.
Posted by: Governor Breck at February 26, 2004 4:24 PMPerhaps Pat Buchanan?
Posted by: jd watson at February 26, 2004 6:18 PMIf you're gonna sell an isolationist/nativist rag you need dictatorships to support and Mexicans to oppose.
Posted by: oj at February 26, 2004 6:29 PMThe greatest harm that oil-for-food did was not that the UN got kickbacks, (for what else would one expect of a largely third-world organization), but that it removed most of the pressures the embargo put on Saddam.
The UN had to approve the contracts for the sale of oil, but Iraq's production costs were low enough that the UN would approve a prospective sale at lower-than-market prices, and then the buyer would give Saddam kick-backs that brought up the cost, but not to market, so it was win-win.
Between that graft and the oil smuggled through Syria, Saddam was actually doing BETTER, financially, than before '91, although his citizens were dying in the streets.
Thus, if one connects the dots, an argument can be made that the '03 war was brought about by oil-for-food and the UN, since the effects of economic sanctions on Saddam were completely undermined.
No wonder Iraqis are just as likely to blow up UN officials as they are US officials.
At least the US occupiers are painting schools.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at February 27, 2004 1:29 AM