The United States took moral authority over UN
The United Nations has a serious credibility problem these days. Not only was it unable to effectively deal with a defiant Iraqi regime and relegated to the sidelines while the United States and friends liberated Iraq, but old reports of UN chicanery recently resurfaced.
In 1995, the United Nations authorized the Oil-for-Food program, allowing Iraq to sell some oil through the United Nations in return for needed humanitarian aid. One problem: The program was corrupt.
The United Nations was running the program, but Saddam Hussein was controlling it. The Coalition for International Justice released a massive report documenting how Hussein was the arbiter by deciding what was needed, who got it and who got to contract for the oil.
The United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan, simply looked the other way.
Alix Freedman and Steve Stecklow of the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Hussein was also imposing illegal surcharges, getting kickbacks and smuggling oil. This was netting him $3 billion a year, according to the British government.
Hussein got the United Nations to convert all the accounts to euros instead of dollars to spite the United States.
The United Nations was also gorging itself: $1 billion in profits from the oil sales with net sales more than $55 billion to date, plus interest still accruing in unpaid sales accounts of $21 billion.
The author of the CIJ report, Susan Blaustein, noted that the oil being sold belonged to the Iraqi people, not Hussein, and that "the UN is colluding in that theft," thus they were trafficking stolen merchandise.
Meanwhile, experts have reported France, Germany and Russia received the bulk of the oil. One wonders why they fought the United States tooth and nail in the Security Council.
Columnist Claudia Rosett called the whole process "Enron-like," noting the original economic sanctions were meant to prevent Hussein from taking oil revenue for his own peccadilloes. The United Nations and Kofi Annan gave him the cover to do just that.
A process designed to aid the hurting citizens of Iraq was aiding everybody but them.
Chuck Colson wrote before the war that "by [the United Nation's] inaction, it gives a cloak of moral authority to tyrants." The "Oil-for-Profit" program worked the same way. The United Nations gave Hussein's regime a seal of approval by circumventing its own resolutions.
The United Nations showed it wasn't willing to engage a threat to the civilized world, putting the organizational coffers over its mandate. They sought gain by creating a smoke screen of an aid program that really aided a dictator and themselves.
Instead of backing their resolutions they sent inspectors who were routinely snowed by a barbarous thug and then made excuses for it.
The United Nations wants to be involved in the rebuilding of Iraq and the final search for weapons of mass destruction. We shouldn't let them; their track record gives them no credence.
Freed Iraqis are not praising the United Nations -- they're praising the United States, who took the cloak of moral authority from the United Nations and did what the United Nations couldn't.
The United States kept its word.
Write to Jeff at mannedarena@yahoo.com
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