Where are the editorials noting the irony of Georgie Boy’s call for “a full and open”
accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq? He’s never given a similar
accounting of his own tainted $200-billion war for democracy in Iraq or any of the other
questionable programs on his agenda.
Besides, if you watched Democracy Now! this morning,
you would have learned that the United States itself — as one of the five permanent members of
the U.N. Security Council (along with Britain, France, Russia and China) — bears great
responsibility in the first place for approving crooked contracts that allowed Saddam Hussein to
reap billions of dollars in kickbacks.
So said Joy Gordon, a Fairfield University professor who is working on a book about the Iraq
sanctions to be published by Harvard University Press. In fact, from 1994 on, the U.S. and Britain
had all the information they needed about the corruption to know something was wrong, she
said.
Therefore the scandal can’t be laid only on the U.N. and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a
view also taken by Dennis Halliday, the former U.N. co-ordinator for humanitarian aid in Iraq.
