Via IP, Claudia Rosett makes an interesting case that the U.N.'s "Oil for Food" program (people seem to have settled on calling it "UNScam") was itself a good reason to remove Saddam:
It's looking more and more as if one of the best reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein was that it was probably the only way to get rid of Oil-for-Food. The problem wasn't simply that this huge United Nations relief program for Iraq became a gala of graft, theft, fraud, palace-building and global influence-peddling--though all that was quite bad enough. The picture now emerging is that under U.N. management the Oil-for-Food program, which ran from 1996-2003, served as a cover not only for Saddam's regime to cheat the Iraqi people, but to set up a vast and intricate global network of illicit finance.
In a world beset right now by terrorist threats--which depend on terrorist financing--it's time to acknowledge that the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program was worse than simply a case of grand larceny. Given Saddam's proclivities for deceit and violence, Oil-for-Food was also a menace to security. By letting Saddam pick his own business partners and draw up his own shopping lists, by keeping the details of his contracts and accounts secret, and by then failing abjectly to supervise the process, the U.N.--through a program meant to aid the people of Iraq--enabled Saddam to line his pockets while bankrolling his pals world-wide.
In Oil-for-Food, "Every contract tells a story," says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they note, was a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI. Another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda's financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam's would-be nuclear-bomb makers.
Basically, Oil-for-Food was Saddam--just slightly harder to spot, swaddled as he was in that blue U.N. flag.
Roger Simon thinks we should sic Giulliani on them. That would be awesome.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
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Noam Chomsky mentioned this some as well: http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/archives/000032.html