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In an editorial in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett asks U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a trenchant question: “What’s 'Illegal'?”

Recall that last week, Mr. Annan voiced the opinion that the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein was illegal. Ms. Rosett counters:

But if Mr. Annan wants to discuss right and wrong in Iraq, which seems to be the real issue, then it is time to talk about baby formula. Why? Because Mr. Annan's preferred means of dealing with Saddam was a mix of U.N. sanctions and the U.N. relief program called Oil-for-Food. And the heart and soul of Oil-for-Food was supposed to be the feeding of sick and hungry Iraqi babies--including the purchase by Saddam, under U.N. auspices, of large amounts of baby formula.

We now know that Saddam was running a scam on his oil-for-food contracts: overpaying for the goods and collecting a substantial portion of the overpayment in kickbacks. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that graft from the U.N. program yielded Saddam at least $10.1 billion.

"Of all the abuses of Oil-for-Food committed by Saddam--and not only allowed but in effect approved and covered up by Mr. Annan's U.N.--the most cynical has to have been the trade in baby formula."

Ironically, Saddam was able to rake off the largest payoffs from the baby formula deals, ostensibly aimed at alleviating the suffering of starving infants. In just four baby food and milk contracts examined by the Pentagon the potential overpayment was 26% for $11 million.

Meanwhile, Mr. Annan's Secretariat, charged with ensuring that the revenues were used for humanitarian purposes, collected more than $1.4 billion in commissions on Saddam's oil sales. In 2002, when Security Council by Oil-for-Food director Benon Sevan reported that acute malnutrition was still rampant among the young children of Iraq, Mr. Annan responded by urging that Saddam be permitted to sell more oil.

Ms. Rosett concludes:

Mr. Annan is due to step down next year. If he wants to leave a legacy more auspicious than having presided over Oil-for-Fraud, he might want to devote his twilight time at the U.N. to mending a system in which a U.N. Secretary-General feels free to describe the overthrow of a murderous tyrant as "illegal," but no one at the top seems particularly bothered to have presided over that tyrant's theft of food from hungry children.

Labels: Claudia Rosett, Iraq, Kofi Annan, Oil-for-Food, Saddam Hussein, United Nations

Claudia Rosett and George Russell write of apparent links between Saddam and Al Qaeda through the United Nations Oil-for-Food program at Fox News (acknowledgements to Belmont Club). By manipulating contract prices, Saddam was able to skim off billions of dollars of revenue. A key question is to what extent these revenues were used to assist Al Qaeda. Rosett, Senior Fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, sees a potential connection to Ahmed Idris Nasreddin and his business partner, Youssef Nada, whose defunct Swiss investment company, Nada Management Organization (formerly called Al Taqwa), based in Lugano, Italy has been accused by the United States of financing terror. Some of these connections between Saddam's business partners and Al Qaeda were raised in the July 8, 2004 Congressional hearing before the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

At that hearing, Ms. Rosett raised two telling points. First, it should have been obvious that something funny was going on with the "Oil-for-Food" program:

"Actually, there is something that I've been debating whether to mention, but I think I should. In discussing the palaces, the weapons, and so on, there is an arithmetic identity here that everybody keeps overlooking. Iraq's government under Saddam had no source of income other than Oil For Food, there was no tax system, there was no other source of income, except oil. Under the U.N. arrangement all oil was supposed to go through the U.N. programs, therefore, anything basically that got funded, the military, the ministries, was either illicit or went through the U.N. The world hasn't noticed this. I am not sure why this doesn't figure in the discussions. But, it would seem to be a very strangely concocted program that we had, and the assumptions that went with it, that this was simply the way it should operate becomes stranger and stranger as you see more about how this whole thing works."

Moreover, the investigation of Oil-for-Food has been as farcical as the program itself.

"...we've all been playing by the U.N. rulebook, which imposes absurd, and self-serving levels of secrecy. Does it strike no one here as strange, for instance, that the United Nations clearing Koto Annan, the son of the Secretary General, of any wrongdoing via the inspections firm Cotecna, hired by the United Nations, that this report was done by an employee of Kofi Annan, and apart from the convenient leak to produce a sympathetic article in the New York Times, it has remained the confidential property of the United Nations."

Later in the hearing, Jed Babbin, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, broadened the charge against the United Nations:

"...as serious as the oil-for-food scandal may be, it is after all only about money. There is a corruption in the U.N. and its agencies that is far more important to every American, and it is not financial corruption. It is a moral corruption, a decadence of thinking and reasoning that tolerates terrorism. No, it's more than just a tolerance -- it's an acceptance of terrorists and the nations that support them, evidencing a moral bankruptcy that is unimaginable to most Americans."

Labels: Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, al Qaeda, Al-Qa'idah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Claudia Rosett, Iraq, Jed Babbin, Kofi Annan, Koto Annan, Oil-for-Food, Saddam Hussein, United Nations, Youssef Nada