Soccer Dad

A Year Later

Last Friday the NY Times ran an editorial "One Year After" that lamented that the Iraq war might not "... have happened if we had known then what we know now."
Of course if we had know that many of the opponents of the war were compromised by the benefits they received from Saddam's Iraq, their objections and motives would rightly have been questioned. MEMRI has published a list of the many individuals and organization who have received oil vouchers from Saddam. Among those lucky recipients included three individuals reportedly close to Jacque Chirac, including the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Merimee; many Arab countries and their leaders; and the Russian state.
Meanwhile Claudia Rosett has reported on the massive corruption of Iraq's oil for food program benefitting, among others, Kojo Annan, Kofi's son.
As the Wall Street Journal observes:

A mountain of evidence has now accumulated to suggest the Iraqi people suffered from shortages of quality food and medicine not because international sanctions were too strict, but because lax or corrupt oversight at U.N. headquarters in New York allowed Saddam Hussein to exploit the system for his own purposes.

Those included rewarding friends and allies world-wide with oil allocations on very favorable terms, as well as extracting large kickbacks from oil traders and suppliers of humanitarian goods. Put more simply, Saddam was allowed to skim off revenue to which the relief program was entitled, while the program was forced to spend the remainder on suppliers chosen by Saddam for reasons that rarely had anything to do with the quality of their goods.

In other words, many of Saddam's defenders were having their palms greased by the Butcher of Baghdad. In return, they and their friends loyally tried to protect Saddam from the Coalition of the Willing. I guess it's encouraging to know that even in this day of ever rising prices that Saddam got his money's worth.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 24, 2004 5:04 AM