Bad Moon Rising

We could see this one coming...according to The Boston Globe's Tom Oliphant on the Imus show this morning, the US is culpable in the oil-for-food scandal. He repeatedly asked "what's the charge?" (against Annan). Jeebus Tom, how about the hundreds of thousands of starved and/or slain Iraqis for starters.

Wretcherd at The Belmont Club takes on James Traub of the Los Angeles Times, who believes that the United States is out to lynch the UN using the Oil-for-Food scandal as a pretext.

In an article entitled Lynch Mob's Real Target Is the U.N., Not Annan, Traub argues that although Oil-for-Food was real, the actual criminal masterminds were certain members of the Security Council.

The oil-for-food program was developed and directed not by U.N. civil servants but by the U.N. Security Council, as are all the organization's sanctions regimes. The diplomats who ran the program worked for the council's member states, including the United States and the four other permanent members. And they ran it according to the interests of those states, with the U.S. and Britain determined to prevent Iraq from importing items that could be used for military purposes and the French, Russians and Chinese equally determined to give the Iraqis the benefit of every doubt. Preventing theft was at the bottom of everyone's to-do list. The U.S. government had dozens of people monitoring the contracts but didn't hold back a single one on the grounds of corruption, price irregularities or kickbacks.

The secretariat deserves some portion of the blame, both for failing to sound the alarm over Iraqi swindling and for a slow and grudging reaction when the allegations first surfaced earlier this year. But the idea that this constitutes a firing offense for the secretary-general -- especially when the call is coming from the folks who rallied to Donald Rumsfeld's side after Abu Ghraib -- is hard to take seriously. I suspect that Annan's persecutors are after something else: not the man, but the institution itself.

The fundamental problem with Traub's argument is that Oil-For-Food existed for the purpose of enforcing sanctions imposed by the Security Council as a whole. It was not a program whose goals could be chosen according to taste, "with the U.S. and Britain determined to prevent Iraq from importing items that could be used for military purposes and the French, Russians and Chinese equally determined to give the Iraqis the benefit of every doubt." It had one purpose only. Oil-For-Food either existed expressly to prevent Saddam's rearmament or it was nothing at all. For that reason, the Secretary General's failure "to sound the alarm over Iraqi swindling and for a slow and grudging reaction when the allegations first surfaced earlier this year" is not primarily about thievery and corruption, although it is about that: it was mainly about flouting international law; it was about subverting the will of the Security Council. It was about Kofi Annan becoming a law unto himself.

As if we need a pretext. While you're there, scroll down to Nov 28th and read up...each post leads back to where the corruption began: France and the UN Security Council.