The Wall Street Journal draws the obvious conclusion from Paul Volcker's report on the "Oil for Food" scandal and indictments this week:
U.N. officials and their allies have been telling the world that the investigation into the Oil for Food scandal is all over, now that Paul Volcker has filed his second interim report. Well, on Thursday a pair of new indictments revealed that we're only getting started.The indictments announced by U.S. Attorney David Kelley support what the critics have long been saying: Oil for Food was designed from the beginning, and virtually in plain sight, in a way that allowed skimming and kickback operations to help Saddam Hussein circumvent U.N. sanctions.
One point to keep in mind is that much of this was known by 2001 if not before, yet the U.N. did nothing to stop it. "Every man and his dog is buying Iraqi oil," said one oil trader quoted by the Times of London in early 2001. The same story described "total anarchy" and "flagrant disregard of U.N. Security Council resolutions" in Oil for Food. A myriad of shady middlemen had moved in after the world's major oil companies shunned Iraq in response to Saddam's widely publicized demand the previous year for illegal kickbacks on oil contracts.
This open and flagrant corruption--the Times story was one of many--is the best evidence of Kofi Annan's unfitness to continue to lead the U.N. It's not merely that it all happened on his watch, but that it was allowed to happen in plain view.
Annan has responded in the way that knaves usually do when caught red-handed: try to shift the spotlight and the blame.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who earlier angered the United States and Britain by calling the Iraq war 'illegal,' has upset both nations again -- this time accusing them of allowing Saddam Hussein to enrich himself selling oil outside the U.N.-run oil-for-food program.Mr. Annan set off the latest dispute on Thursday by asserting that Saddam made more money smuggling oil to Jordan and Turkey -- under the noses of the United States and Britain -- than he skimmed from the 1996-2003 U.N.-run oil-for-food program.
Britain took particular umbrage at Mr. Annan's remarks, noting that a preliminary report by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker blamed the United Nations for the debacle.
The Volcker report was very clear on where to place responsibility, Bill Rammell, a minister in Britain's Foreign Office, said yesterday.
"Now I think the U.N. needs to learn those lessons," Mr. Rammell said.
The combination of personal arrogance and avarice plus the endemic lack of integrity of any system or organization without accountability is deadly. They always exist together and cannot be fixed separately.
David Brooks gave five important reasons this week why he supports John Bolton for U.S. ambassador to the U.N., among them:
John Bolton is just the guy to explain why this vaporous global-governance notion is a dangerous illusion, and that we Americans, like most other peoples, will never accept it.We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.
Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.
Posted by Alan at April 16, 2005 09:08 AM