History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.
Claudia Rossett, Oil for Food, and the United Nations
by Cliopatria
According to Claudia Rossett’s piece (registration, and possibly subscription, required) in the February 21st New Republic, the United Nations’ Oil for food scandal “was the largest scam in the history of humanitarian relief.” She has been the foremost journalist in assessing this scandal, bringing it to the world long before most news outlets believed Oil for Food to be a story. For a comprehensive tally of her reportage (with hyperlinks) go here
Rossett is Journalist-in-Residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based antiterrorist think tank. As many of you know, I was a fellow with FDD in 2003-2004 and maintain my affiliation with them to this day. As a result of this, I have been able to follow Claudia’s work since 2003. Like most people (by which I mean almost everyone) I simply had no idea of the dimensions of this travesty.
The world certainly knows now. Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman and head of the UN-authorized inquiry into the scandal, has issued the first interim report. The details are grim, and the “interim report” status indicates that there is more to come. Anyone who has read Rossett knows that much more should be forthcoming. The money section from Rossett’s TNR intro:
But Volcker's recent interim report--there is another interim one expected soon and a final report due out this summer--does not even begin to address the true dimensions of Oil-for-Food, in which the United Nations oversaw more than $110 billion of Saddam's business transactions while Saddam racked up sanctions-busting illicit income estimated at anywhere from $9 to $17 billion.
In the end, Rossett places much of the blame for this monstrous blow to UN credibility firmly on the shoulders of Kofi Annan:
At the United Nations, public accountability can ricochet forever between the Secretariat, which functions as its executive branch, and the Security Council. But, in this case, ultimate responsibility must rest with Annan. Although the Security Council created and oversaw the Oil-for-Food Programme, staff from Annan's Secretariat helped design and run the program, and the Secretariat benefited financially from its existence and pushed for its expansion. Annan knew the program was corrupt. In choosing to remain silent about its abuses, he failed to uphold the integrity of his office and of the United Nations as a whole.
The UN is in trouble, folks. For years I was one of those liberal defenders of the idea of the United Nations. I still believe in the general concept. But in execution, it is becoming increasingly difficult to look at the United Nations as currently formulated as a serious, effective (at least for good) international body. It is a peacekeeping body that no longer keeps peace. It is a human rights organization that allows the most gross violators of human rights to define policy and programs. It is a democratic body that gives equal weight to ruthless dictatorships. It is an anti-racist body subject to the whims of the cruelest bigots. I want for there to be an organization, a “parliament of man” in the grandiloquent words of Woodrow Wilson, where liberal democracies and those who truly aspire toward liberalism can work together to live up to the ideals of which the United Nations has too often fallen so very short. Barring some pretty substantial changes, the current body is not it.
Disagree? Perhaps I am being too harsh. But ask the Rwandans who died in the hundreds of thousands as a result of the UN peacekeeping forces and their utter ineffectiveness in 1994. Ask the Iraqi people who suffered as the result of sanctions that managed to deny them some of the bare essentials for survival while the UN not only turned a blind eye, but in fact facilitated its central program enriching Saddam and making a mockery of the sanctions. Ask the parents of the next Israeli child to die at a bus stop or pizzeria at the hands of a suicide bomber after the UN allows the most vicious calumny against Israel to go unchecked in its deliberative bodies. Ask. And then ask yourself – can we not do better?
Once we have 270 million blogs all chirping away, then we'll need some new techno fix in order to carry on dialogues. Brain implants, maybe.
"Beating up the United States over the UN's problems is not going to make for a better UN", nor is the converse. THAT (converse) was my point all along. Until universal blogdom comes, I -or most anyone else- will be coming to a little sequence like this to read original ideas (not, for example, recycled boilerplate fear-of-black-UN-helicopters).
Despite your attempted disclaimer, you of course HAVE just commented on my immediately prior comment, and had you been Derek or some fourth party, any other person reading along (assuming there is any) would have had to bob back and forth to figure out the context of the post and which prior ones it referenced.
It is amazing the lengths you guys will go to to avoid the slightest acknowledgement of an imperfection. Where to place posts is really no big deal, but there are some peculiarities of the HNN configuration and I simply offered a bit of constructive criticism about the approach taken here, as a side remark to the main discussion, about 6 posts ago. With normal adults, a brief acknowledgement would have followed and that would have been the end of it, but you and Catsam have such micron-thick skins, you prefer to make a federal case over a little technical detail, rather than admit to even the most minor of mistakes. I've been around this website long enough, I know whereof I speak, at least with regard to your colleague. Unless this thread is an aberration, you are little different in that regard.
Goodbye
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
Derek:
Points well-taken if somewhat heatedly expressed (and I think there was a "blazin' gun" or two in the original blog entry too for that matter).
Two modest tactical suggestions:
1. If you hit reply beneath the comment you wish to respond to, the "thread" will be easier to "trace".
2. As you probably have guessed, I am not a regular reader of your blog. If you have already provided the context (which I find lacking in this piece) in a prior commentary, why not do your readers the favor of briefly citing that prior commentary ?
Bottom line: Contrary to the apparent belief of those who ritually bash it, the UN is not a sovereign entity, but basically an umbrella for whatever policies the permanent security council members concur on at the time. Ultimately, any criticism of the former is incomplete with at least a glancing reference to the latter.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
The purpose of the UN was to prevent World War III. There has been no World War III.
The UN is not a world government.
It is nonetheless perfectly appropriate to call for punishment for the Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal, including of Kofi Annan, if proper investigations such as Volcker's conclude that he was involved.
For members of the U.S. Congress, however, to get all righteously indignant about the UN's past crooked activities in Iraq while utterly ignoring the current ripoffs and scams perpetrated by Dick Cheney's Halliburton in Iraq is pure hypocrisy.
More than 20 years after Rumsfeld went to shake hands with Saddam, there has already far too much hypocrisy over Iraq.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
The choice of "theme covered" has no relevance to this conversation.
You still have not figured out how to post properly. It is not a question of chronology, there you are okay, it is a question of ambiguit; i.e. to which previous comment is yours referring. For example, for your latest to be a reply to my latest (before this) your latest should be indented under mine. Otherwise it appears that you and I are both commenting on your penultimate post. I will now post a reply to your first comment in this thread to show what I mean.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
See: no more chronology or clarity of reference.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
Then I should go here
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
If I am Joe Blow commenting on Clarke's "Remarks 1"
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
Preventing disease outbreaks is not a key goal of the UN charter.
Of course, one could not say, as I specifically did not, that the UN was the only (or even the main) reason why there has not been another world war. My point was and is that the "failure" of the UN needs to evaluated in the context of what it is supposed to do (and not do). On that basis, the hippocratic principle is much more applicable to the Bush Administration which set out to (a) not do nation-building, (b) "smoke out" Al Qaeda (c) get Bin Laden dead or alive (d) disarm Saddam, (e) find the WMD and (f) organize an international coalition to help rebuild Iraq. Flip-flopping missions not accomplished.
The UN's many serious screw-ups are nonetheless not in the same league as those of the world's superpower under its current C-average pretend-leader.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
P.S. Congrats on figuring out where to click
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
None of us is immune.
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
Derek,
My "issues" have to do with the many-sided hypocrisy which is at the root of both the history of the last 50 years of relations between Iran, Iraq, and the U.S. generally, and the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration's foreign policy in particular. To discuss a scandal of the relatively weak and ineffective UN without at least acknowledging the deeper scandals of its much stronger constituent powers (especially, though certainly not only, the U.S.) alternately coddling and brutally overthrowing one tyrant after the next in that part of the world, sounds borderline hypocritical itself. You want to focus on the exposed tip of an iceberg. I have no problem with that, but certainly think it also "germane" to refer to parts of the larger underlying monstrosity.
If you don't like the "frozen" analogy, here is a somewhat "boiled down version": The U.N. did not have the proper tools and support of member countries to make oil-for-food work (even if had been squeaky clean in its implementation, which I certainly agree it was not, by a longshot). Moreover, had it not been for the long string of American screw-ups (and European greed), Saddam would quite possibly have been gone already by the mid '90s (hence no need for oil-for-food): removed by the Iranians in the '80s, by Schwarzkopf in 1991, or by the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites later that year, or later in the '90s as a result of inspectors going in with armed escorts.
George W. was responsible for none of these past errors, but he has managed to surpass them all the same. Unless you acknowledge at least some of this history, and some of the many current and in-progress scandals of the Bush crew’s mess-ups in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, focusing solely on the oil-for-food scandal risks sounding like a run-of-the-mill recycled Republican apologia. I would have thought you had more creative ambitions
Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007
Tom,
If you don't like "smashing", you can start a new "continuation" thread when the diagonal trajectory veers to far to the right. Not posting under the comment you are responding, however, to leads to a confusing mess when there more than two people in a conversation with multiple posts by each. Another cause of "smashing" is the tendency of some posters to go to great lengths (e.g. many posts) trying to avoid owning up to a small oversight, rather than just owning up straight off. "Just my opinion" based on several years of following HNN.
By any moral calculus, oil for food was a major improvement over the usual oil for dangerous weapons policies of Reagan and Bush I in his first 18 months. What you probably meant, had you stopped to think it through first, was that the abuse of UN's oil for food deal with Saddam's Iraq, and the lining of corrupt pockets thereby resulting, was bad. No disagreement from me on that.
Allan patton -
7/29/2005
i agree with her.......
Stephen Tootle -
2/24/2005
The UN has promise more oversight to prevent another oil for food type scandal. The security council still has veto power. I don't think it is right for undemocratic nations to have any say over the affairs of democratic nations, so I suppose the answer to your question is no.
I don't quite get Peter's overt hostility either. Everyone has had their comments appear either where they did not intend, or else has responded to points in several comments so that there is no clear and logical place to put the comments. Peter was looking for a fight, that much is clear. He could not do so on the substance of the post or the subsequent comments, so instead he decided to take his stand on the ever-important issue of comment placement. There are two possibilities here -- that peiople are intentionally placing their comments willy nilly in order to vex Peter K. Clarke (and yet in places where the arguments are seemingly still pretty clear), or people place their comments as they think appropriate. I'll let readers decide which of these makes more sense. Then I'll let them further decide whether, even if the former is the case, it warranted Mr. Clarke's personal attacks as a consequence. I, for one, trust our readers.
dc
Tom Bruscino -
2/21/2005
Peter,
I'm a little confused. I seriously answered all of your points, and you decided to accuse me of all sorts of nasty things, again. Let me try one more time...
No one was beating up the UN to make the U.S. look better, so I don't understand what your point about the converse. The UN needs reforming because it is important and scandals like oil for food threaten its very existence. That was the point of Derek's post, nothing more. Nothing either Derek or I have written even vaguely hints at "recycled boilerplate fear-of-black-UN-helicopters."
As far as the reply feature on HNN goes, I will happily admit that I am not perfect, and nor is the HNN comment system, but it is better than most comment boards I have seen. That said, I have acknowledged your criticism, but I do not agree. For example, I am clearly responding to Peter's post #54278, however, to do so, I replied to my last comment #54276, so that my latest comment would be directly under Peter's to which I am responding, rather than farther to the right. I do this deliberately (i.e.: not by mistake) because I do not want to press the comments up against the right side of the screen. Maybe that is confusing to some people. I think it is easier to read. If our readers disagree in large numbers I will gladly change styles.
Tom Bruscino -
2/20/2005
Note that I am not replying to Mr. Clarke last comment, but rather to my comment, and it is under the comment to which I am replying. It's not confusing at all, and nor is it smashed up against the right side of the comment screen. There, it's official, we've just responded to the most inane conversation we've ever had on HNN. Fantastic.
As far as me saying "oil for food is bad," I think if you stopped to think it through first, I pretty clearly meant the scandal. Was anyone confused what Derek was talking about when the title of his post included the phrase "Oil for Food," and not scandal? Also, I was echoing Derek's statement above (in comment #53661), "Oil for food is pretty bad."
The oil for food scandal is bad--bad for the UN, not the United States. Attempts to pin UN and UN member corruption on the United States, even the evil Reagan and George H.W. Bush regimes, does not create in most Americans a warm cuddly feeling for international institutions. It makes us feel like international institutions won't own up to their own problems, and thus aren't really worth our time. I think that is a bad thing. We need the UN. But we need the UN to be fair and effective.
Beating up the United States over the UN's problems is not going to make for a better UN, or a more cooperative U.S. Just my opinion.
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/19/2005
Hard to take your subtle insult seru=iously. You are here reading my blog and have made several comments related to where I have been posting my comments. I write the blog. You read it, You comment on it. Then you claim that the blog is trivial. Seriously, man. Give it up. I am quite certain that if antyone cared about this absolutely stupid little stance of yours is of no interest to anyone, and if you think my blog -- or as you put it for some reason, with the scare quotes like a timid undergrad, "blog" -- is an insignificant use of time, what does that say about people who make picayune criticisms on someone else's blog with no scare quotes? (And, by the way, you post enough on HNN that I will be watching -- everyone places their comments in the wrong place inadvertantly at some point. You will do so too, and probably soon rather than later. Then I can call you a hypocrite and can imply that you are dumb, bringuing any possibility of aproductive conversation to a screeching halt. It will be fun. And like this conversation, so very, very productive. Lay off. You are being pathetic.)
dc
Tom Bruscino -
2/19/2005
I'd like to add that I personally like it when the comments go straight down and do not get smashed up against the right side of the screen. Just my opinion.
Oh, and oil for food is bad.
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/19/2005
Methinks someone needs a hobby.
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/16/2005
Peter --
Thanks for the advice on posting comments on my blog, but I am unsure to what you are referring -- from what I can tell, the comments follow perfectly chronologically.
Why would I refer to my previous criticisms of the Bush administration in a post that is about the current state of the UN. I think my post stands pretty well on its own. If you want to see criticisms or other topics covered, keep reading, but you cannot expect that every post is going to touch upon every theme you want covered. But we'll do our best!
dc
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/15/2005
Peter --
At what point have I not acknowledged my criticisms of ther Bush administration or American policy vis a vis Saddam? You come in here guns a blazin' with all sorts of accusations clearly without knowing the backstory of other things that I (or others) have written on Rebunk. Each post cannot be a 1:1 scale map of the universe in which I address every possible salient issue related to whatever it is on which we decide to focus. If you want a dissertation, go to the library. I cannot trace evey phenomenon back to the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon. Cut some freakin' slack for people trying to write coherent and digestible mini-op eds rather than for not grinding your axes. One can reasonably criticize the UN qua UN without it always coming back to some sort of parallelism with the current administration.
dc
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/15/2005
Oil for food is pretty bad. That the UN has made many situations worse or has sat back and quite literally watched while people died in ways that were preventable is, to be mild, problematic. You obviously have issues with the Bush administration. Fine. I do too. But I am not certain what that has to do with anything. It does not seem all that germane to my post.
dc
Jessica Leigh Lindemood -
2/14/2005
I don't agree with the idea of communism, but that wasn't my question. I asked if there was a checks and balances system in the United Nations to prevent future issues like the "Oil for Food" scandal. Also, is it right for every nation's representatives to hold the same weight in the UN?
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/14/2005
Peter --
Your first point is a good one. And while the UN is not a global government, like doctors with the hippocratic oath, it probably ought to be part of the UN creed to "Do no harm." And in any case, crediting the UN with something that did not happen is a bit of a causal leap. We have not had a major global outbreak of plague again either. I'd be reluctant to credit the UN with that.
dc
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/13/2005
Oscar --
I think you identify two important issues:
1) There are things that the UN does well, and it may not be wise to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I would have no problem with reform, but that reform would be pretty radical, and do you see the French acquiescing to such changes? I do wonder if the UN isn't best when it is a giant NGO and isn't at its worst when actually dealing with issues related to nation states and global politics. But more to the point, doesn't the UN actually lose credibility even in those areas where it does well in light of things like oil for food?
2) The disengagement from the rest of the world save in those pockets where force is a logical outcropping is hugely damaging to this administration, and I suspect that history will judge it harshly as a result. Doing something poorly that happens to result in something resembling a good result is, at best, a mixed bag.
dc
Derek Charles Catsam -
2/13/2005
At the risk of sounding as if I believe in a Whiggish view of history whereby we are attaining goals of perfectibility, I think one thing that is very useful is that the world is a less friendly place to despots than it was even a century ago. This is not to say that there is not plenty of despotism, plenty of evil, but it is to say that evil meets with a level of scrutiny now that it never did in centuries previous. Therefore if we have contintent-wide (or some other logical organizuing system) bodies, perhaps we can be less worried that they will descend into chaos.
I'll say it again -- I like the idea of a global body that helps to bring about peace and to deal with issues of justice. I'm just not sure that all nations belong in it as a matter of course. Any global body that includes representation for the murderous heads of state of Syria, Libya, or Zimbabwe is a folly. What I do think is that even if the heads of such nation states do not deserve inclusion, the peoplke of those states deserve the attention of such a body. In an odd sense, then, those nations that are excluded would automatically earn their people closer attention, their leaders closer scrutiny.
dc
Oscar Chamberlain -
2/12/2005
The UN has several well run components, from what I gather, and a number of badly run ones. Reforming the latter while rewarding the former strikes me as the ideal goal.
Unfortunately, we have an administration right now that does not believe in organizations like the UN functioning well. In fact, with the significant exception of the World Trade Organization, this administration is openly hostile to any effective international institution that is independent of the United States.
I suspect they like a UN weakened by corruption. In supporting Kofi Annan they may even see themselves as exploiting that corruption.
Greg Robinson -
2/12/2005
Agree with Tootle.
E. Simon -
2/12/2005
And national sovereignty will (more or less) survive. In no way am I disagreeing with your assessment of its moral and institutional failures. But I think continued regional integration will almost certainly drastically alter its utility. European integration has certainly been accompanied by a drive toward expanding the vocabulary of liberalism and democracy, and I think this has been influenced by its sense of "continental pluralism" -- (i.e. respect for different countries speaking different languages, different cultures, etc.) Will the Community of South American Nations (SACN) or the African Union (AU) be similarly driven (at least within their own spheres of influence)? It seems that the AU is at least appearing willing to take initiative in commiting troops in Sudan, even if not in an entirely effective way. So in this regard, they are perhaps further ahead than was Europe in the Balkans in wanting to put their own face on a "domestic tranquility" operation. Europe is still going through NATO and the UN for these types of things and debating the precise nature of the shape that its domestic and common defenses will eventually take -- but I am sure they will get there sooner or later.
In the meantime, I think we can discourage the possibility that such organizations could ever be transformed into continent-wide tyrannies by continuing to dispatch diplomatic and military efforts according to a model of increased "vertical multilateralism," where the U.N., regional and national organizations, both governmental and NGOs, are encouraged to play as much of a constructive role as they can in working together to defuse and resolve these crises. Whichever body (or bodies) emerge as the most effective in doing so will gain the most legitimacy. My hope is for further integration and cooperation, but I doubt this will happpen without the continued emergence and strengthening of regional organizations to fill the political gap between a will to effectively deal with national or trans-national humanitarian failures and a politically provincial U.N.
This prescription is certainly in contrast to Chirac's resuscitated, (and failed, in the context of pre-WWII European history) "balance of power" paradigm, which overemphasizes geographical polarity at the expense of integration.
Stephen Tootle -
2/12/2005
Communism is not a great thing on paper.
Jessica Leigh Lindemood -
2/11/2005
The United Nations, much like communism, is a great thing on paper. However, it obviously leaves too much room for corruption. It is strange to think that racists, bigots, and tyrants hold the same weight as any other in the UN, but we really couldn't have it any other way, could we? It is noble to think of a "Parliment of Men", but is it really a possibility? What, if any, are the checks and balances in this organization? How can this kind of corruption from happening?
