Monday, January 17, 2005
Oil-for-food: The NYT hides the ball, again
Well, the Times has done it again in another editorial this morning. It is really unbelievable.
After reviewing the history of the oil-for-food scandal, the Times began its hunt for the guilty with the United Nations bureaucracy, which got my hopes up:
The blame lies either with the U.N. bureaucracy or with the Security Council, to which the audit division passed the buck. It makes a big difference which explanation is right. If the U.N. officials overseeing the oil-for-food program were attempting to hide this corruption because they were incapable - or too corrupt - to do anything about it, the United Nations' troubles would seem immense enough to justify its bitterest critics.
True enough. And since the bitterest critics of the United Nations are pretty damn bitter, this is quite a concession from the one-worlders at the Times.
Alas, my hopes were to be dashed in the next paragraph:
But it's a different story if most of the blame lies with the Security Council, whose members, including the United States, may have overlooked the corruption for their own reasons. Some Security Council members, for example, may have preferred to keep their eyes on the main goal - denying Iraq weapons of mass destruction - without worrying about surcharges and kickbacks. In that case, most of the current U.N. bashing would look off target.
So the Security Council is culpable because it did not clean up corruption within Kofi Annan's bureaucracy? Does that mean that Kofi Annan is working for the Security Council? That's a fairly unique construction of the governance of the United Nations, and I imagine it will come as a surprise to Secretary General Annan.
More troubling, though, is that Times finds it preferable to blame "the Security Council" -- which allows it to sweep in the United States under some unstated theory of collective guilt -- than individual countries whose citizens took the bribes and whose companies then traded with Saddam. According to the Times' editors, the United States is culpable because French and Russian businessmen and politicians took these bribes and the United States did nothing about it. Under that rationale, the United States is responsible for all the evil in the world that it has not yet found time to remedy.
Although you would never know it from reading the Times editorial page, Saddam's oil-for-food kickbacks were nothing less than an attempt to subvert the Security Council's deliberations by buying vetoes from France and Russia. If a single mass-murdering dictator can eviscerate the credibility of the Security Council by buying the votes of permanent members, Woodrow Wilson's dream of collective security will never be realized through the offices of the United Nations. This would be a great disappointment to the internationalists at The New York Times, who cannot bring themselves to see the oil-for-food scandal as anything more than a need for better internal controls.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Jan 17, 08:26:00 PM:
The premise of this post somewhat confuses me. Perhaps you can help me out.
In this post and the other you seem to take as given that oil-for-food malfeasance on the part of a few private individuals and companies somehow translated into the offical national policy of France and others. Even the hypothesis seems pretty tenuous to me, never mind the evidence.
My own impression is that this accusation was manufactured by various right-wing talk show hosts, bloggers, etc., in order to square the opposition of various (presumably well informed) nations to the war with Iraq's obvious (to them) threat.
The alternative to believing that France et. al., were corrupt was to believe that there could be legitimate reasons for thinking that Saddam posed no danger to anyone outside his own borders (or at least not enough to justify the cost of war).
Given the findings of the US' own inspectors, this latter view now seems entirely vindicated. I would hope that even the most ardent Hawk could now concede that the official reasons given by the Security Council dissenters are at least creditable. Can you really still believe that oil-for-food corruption need have been a factor in their decisions?
By 
TigerHawk, at
Mon Jan 17, 10:06:00 PM:
As you say, it cannot be proven that France and Russia voted the way they did in the Security Council because Saddam directed trade and oil vouchers in the direction of French and Russian businesses. I absolutely agree that France and Russia had legitimate raisons d'etat to take the positions that they took. Perhaps those reasons were their only reasons, or perhaps those reasons were in addition to the commercial advantages that those countries were realizing in Iraq under Saddam.
However, it is manifestly the case that Saddam attempted to subvert votes on the Security Council, and that the most effective diplomatic means at his disposal, other than ambient anti-Americanism, were contracts and kickbacks under the oil-for-food program. It is also the case that France and Russia, the principle opponents of the American effort to remove Saddam, traded more with Saddam's Iraq than any other permanent Security Council nation. There is not always fire when there's smoke, but it is pretty hard to deny that these coincidences are at least smoke.
In any other comparable situation, the NYT would be tut-tutting about the "appearance of impropriety" and such even if it had no proof of corruption. In this case, the Times seems content to take the point of view that "the Security Council" as an entity was somehow responsible for its failure to oversee the U.N. bureaucracy. This perspective has the consequence, happily for the Times, of absolving Kofi Annan and the U.N. bureaucrats and indicting the United States, all in one analytical construct.
So you're right that there is no proof that Saddam succeeded in improperly influencing the votes of France and Russia. But the Times coverage of the mess seems grossly out-of-step with its usual rigorous examination of bureaucratic failure in either corporations or American government. Why would that be, other than because of a bizarre romanticization of the United Nations?
By , at
Mon Jan 17, 11:20:00 PM:
Jack
This 10/7/04 Instapundit post has a bunch of related links on French/Russian payola.
I've also been looking all day for an article (I think from the Scotsman) I read about how back in the 90s the US & UK tried to tighten up OFF but were met with French/Russian obstruction but alas I can't find it.
Rob A.
(F?WF?)
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Jan 18, 06:03:00 AM:
Pollack said as much in The Threatening Storm.
By , at
Wed Jan 19, 04:33:00 AM:
Me again. Thanks for the reply, but I think you miss part of my point.
The oil-for-food scandal is basically about a few members of the UN bureaucracy (allegedly) being subverted in order to perpetrate a scheme which netted Saddam and his foreign partners a fair amount of money. This money was apparently used by Saddam to purchase some weapons and luxuries, make payments to Palestinians, etc.
This is the story the press is covering, and it's already quite scandalous enough. I don't really want to put myself in the position of defending Times editorial policy, but it certainly seems to me that there are sufficient thinly evidenced accusations in it to provide editorial consistency with coverage of whatever other scandals you'd like to compare it too.
The idea that Saddam was using these transactions to influence state policy in these nations is in a class by itself as far as thinly evidenced accusations go. From a national perspective, the profits involved were minor, nevermind the fact that many of the firms were only nominally, e.g., French, and only a fraction of those funds would have ended up as tax revenue or entering the national economy. Unless bribes to cabinet level officals were involved (which, AFAIK, has not even been insinuated), this seems like a very poor way indeed to sway state policy on such an important and well scrutinized issue. Besides, the scam was presumably in operation years before Saddam could have even suspected that a war was threatened.
The theory is analogous to finding some oddly placed stones in the western part of an Iraqi palace garden and concluding that Saddam must have been throwing them from his balcony in a desperate attempt to bombard Israel.
I think I can forgive the editorial omission this time around.
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