The US against the UN

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations finds that the US is the main perpetrator in the scandal surrounding the oil-for-food program

Since the end of 2004, the press in the US has been in a frenzy. In the UN’s oil-for-food program, oil is said to have been sold illegally via companies from countries such as Russia, France, and even Germany. Kofi Annan’s son is said to have played a major role in this smuggling operation, and -- what else does one expect -- funds are said to have flown back to dictator Saddam Hussein. A scandal! At least, that's what the press in the US would have us believe. But the real scandal is a different one: how come a large-scale smuggling operation that has been known for years is suddenly making headlines in the US?

In Europe, the press has reported about the scandal, but generally as a domestic policy issue in the US. After all, in Europe the media have been reporting about this illicit activity for some time now -- for instance, in the French documentary Irak, barils de pétrole, barils de poudre from 2003.

Le programme “pétrole contre nourriture”, sous le contrôle étroit des Nations unies, assure – tout juste – la survie des habitants. En revanche, la contrebande de pétrole enrichit le régime irakien, les États voisins et les négociants.

The film shows how the US, which monitors anything that moves in Iraq, cannot but have known about the constant convoy of trucks carrying oil from Iraq to neighboring states friendly to the US, such as Turkey and Jordan.

But the media in Europe did not start reporting about this illicit trade in 2003. As early as 1999, the BBC reported that the Americans and the British, who controlled everything in Iraq, were allowing oil to be smuggled out of the country:

As many as 700 trucks come this way every day bound for Turkey, almost all of them are carrying fuel, most of it diesel. Under the terms of the UN's oil-for-food programme, this is sanctions-busting. It's hardly a secret. Some of the tankers carry several thousand litres of cheap fuel into Turkey at a time. It is obvious to anyone standing at the side of the road what is going on.... Smuggling between Iraq and Turkey is increasingly sophisticated. The Kurds act as the middlemen. No-one seems to mind.

Anyone witnessing the recent hounding of the UN in the press in the US since December of 2004 must have been wondering why everyone was getting so upset all of a sudden. And above all, why were the Americans acting like everyone else had been involved, but not themselves?

Monday night, the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reported its findings from its investigation of possible US involvement in the scandal. The Subcommittee found that the US is responsible for some 52% of the overall volume of oil sold illicitly. According to an article in the British daily The Guardian, the Senate's report concludes that the US not only knew about such transactions, but expressly approved of them, as did the rest of the UN Security Council:

On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

From the Senate's report

Among other things, documents were found that prove that the US shipping firm Odin Marine Inc. shipped crude out of the port in Khor al-Amaya with the approval of the US, although this port was officially closed under the oil-for-food program. Specifically, the documents reveal that the company got the go-ahead from the US military, which assured the company that they would not intervene if the shipments were made.

The real scandal

It's bad enough that such an international body as the UN can stoop so low. Apparently, some of the UN staff must have said to themselves, "The US is throwing a smuggling party, and everyone's gonna be there!" What else could be expected of a secretary-general who was practically appointed by the US after the Clinton administration had basically thrown Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, out of office. The US vetoed the reelection of the popular Egyptian, who spoke French as well as he did English, against the will of the rest of the world. Boutros-Ghali wanted to step up humanitarian aid, and he criticized the West for doing too little in Rwanda when the genocide could have been stopped. In other words, he was a pain in the US's neck.

Kofi Annan seemed more likely to become a sycophant to the US. But in the end, not even he could approve of every foreign-policy decision the US made; even he criticized the preemptive strike against Iraq. So he got what was coming to him at the end of 2004.

The whole scandal was set off when the neo-conservative New York Sun made payments worth $150,000 to Kofi Annan's son public. Among other people, influential neo-conservative Richard Perle is a business partner of Conrad Black, who owns the Sun.

But the sudden agitation in the US press since the end of 2004 gives us great cause for alarm, for it demonstrates that the press in the US is unable to do two basic things: 1) investigate on their own, instead of waiting for some governmental spokesperson to tell them what scandal they should be writing about; and 2) keep an eye on reports from outside the US, especially the ones that are already in English and therefore don't even have to be translated.

What's worse, the Bush administration must have assumed that the central role that the US played in this "scandal" was going to come to light sooner or later. In other words, Americans were intentionally misled by people full well knowing that their own complicity would soon be revealed.

Flagrant nonchalance

Once again, the Bush administration does not seem to mind being shown to be hypocritical. Back when the Bush administration claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they must have assumed that the truth would soon be known. But they seem to rest assured that it does not matter whether their own credibility is called into question -- it doesn't matter what the outside world thinks anyway, and Bush seems to be able to get a majority of Americans to support him even when it is clear that he "made a mistake."

Bush and Cheney have a long history of such astonishing nonchalance. Back in 2001, Cheney came under fire because his company Halliburton had been involved in lucrative business deals with Saddam Hussein via domestic and foreign subsidiaries. Your average businessmen would have claimed that he could not possibly know about every single business transaction of every one of these subsidiaries in such a large international consortium. That wouldn't take the heat off him because it would nonetheless be a breach of due diligence, but at least everyone would have known what the poor man was saying.

But in 2000, Cheney claimed on US television that there had never been any such transactions, as the Washington Post reported in 2001:

I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.... We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that.

Three weeks later, he had to take back this claim. Only then did he claim that he simply had not known about these transactions, but he also quickly added that Halliburton had soon afterwards sold off these subsidiaries. The contradiction is apparent: he didn’t know about these transactions, but the subsidiaries had been sold off quickly because of them…

The report in the Washington Post also proves that the press in the US had been reporting about the scandal for many years, albeit only marginally:

U.S. and European officials acknowledged that the expanded production also increased Saddam Hussein's capacity to siphon off money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program.

No major US paper systematically investigated the crucial role that the US was playing in the oil-for-food scandal. Thanks to this lapse, Kofi Annan, his son, and the entire UN have now been under fire for some six months -- at least in the US. Meanwhile, in Europe the media are not only reporting about the scandal, but also wondering why the US is suddenly so upset.

Where does this take us?

At the moment, it is not clear whether this report from the US Senate will "save" Kofi Annan. But he himself is not as important as the general attitude that the US has towards the UN. Will the report change anything in this respect?

Perhaps, for the press in the US seems to have woken up on this issue. On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published a detailed report about the history of business dealings between the Bayoil company of Houston, which played a major role in the smuggling that took place in the past few years, and the Iraq régime -- dealings that date back to the 1980s.

However, the "scandal" surrounding the oil-for-food program is just one part of a much larger campaign that aims to discredit the UN entirely. US interests are to take the foreground. In other words, even if it now becomes clear, finally, that the US played a major role in this affair, a lot of Americans will nevertheless be left with the impression that the UN is corrupt.

And that is exactly what some neo-conservatives want, such as the people behind www.moveamericaforward.org, who are proud of having collected 100,000 signatures in a petition to "kick the UN out of the US." The nomination of John Bolton as the US's ambassador to the UN is another part of this campaign. After all, Bolton has mostly qualified himself for this position by calling for an abolishment of the UN.

So while making US involvement in the scandal surrounding the oil-for-food program clear is certainly a step forward, it is also only a small one. There is still much work to be done. The principal opponents of the UN within the US have not been weakened, and journalists in the US have not become more investigative. At the moment, one of the hottest topics in England is a memo from a meeting between Blair and Bush in July of 2002. The memo states that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." But in the US, this memo is somehow not a hot topic, as the Chicago Tribune reported on Tuesday.