Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Hitchens on Galloway
A member of the British Parliament was in receipt of serious money originating from a homicidal dictatorship. That money was supposed to have been used to ameliorate the suffering of Iraqis living under sanctions. It was instead diverted to the purposes of enriching Saddam's toadies and of helping them propagandize in favor of the regime whose crimes and aggressions had necessitated the sanctions and created the suffering in the first place. This is something more than mere "corruption." It is the cynical theft of food and medicine from the desperate to pay for the palaces of a psychopath.
Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.
The core scandal -- the purchasing of votes on the Security Council -- has been all but ignored by apologists for the United Nations, who like to think that the Oil-for-Food scandal was just one more lining of Saddam Hussein's pockets. Thanks to Senator Coleman, it will be much harder to ignore the elephant in the room.
Hitchens closes with the last obvious question:
Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.
Will Democracy Now! stand by their man?
4 Comments:
By 
Dan Kauffman, at
Wed Oct 26, 12:07:00 AM:
By John F. Opie, at
Wed Oct 26, 05:57:00 AM:
To make things even worse, consider this: the French now appear to have shopped bogus intelligence in order to try to stop the war.
See this (shameless plug for my blog):
http://21stcenturyschizoidman.blogspot.com/2005/10/speechless-really.html
with a tip of the hat to Austin Bay...
Incredible. I have always said that the truth will come out and vindicate what the US did, but now the rot appears to me to have gone even further than probably any of us would have thought...
John
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Oct 26, 06:28:00 AM:
Indeed. I blogged the "French connection" to the forged Niger documents more than a year ago.
By Cardinalpark, at
Wed Oct 26, 08:40:00 AM:
oh i am howling with laughter. Will the believers in the virtue of the un security council please step forward? The heroes of the antiwar movement are subverted and shown to be the corrupt enemies of the us that they are.
A joy, really. The French, the Russians, and a psychopath's playmate Galloway, a British MP no less.
It does not get better than this. Perhaps it will turn out that many other names will tumble forth - Scott Ritter, UN weaspons inspector? Perhaps Hans Blix?
Perhaps Sulzberger too?
Too much fun really.
