The Dartmouth Beacon

Those dollars, and the incalculable sum of our men’s lives, procured for humankind a shell of a world: safer from the dangers of empire, but without trade, infrastructure, capital, energy, or motivation. The world was propped up largely on American shoulders. We said, “Never again!” with our typical patriotic verve. And as a permanent enshrinement of that promise, we built the United Nations Organization. It was to be humanity’s citadel.

Over time, its name was shortened to ‘UN’ as lingual ease displaced the rigor of war. Its physical symbol: the wall of gleaming glass called the Secretariat Building, on the east side of Manhattan. Unlike any other building, it faces only two directions, though it is four-sided. The side walls are solid brick rather than glass: no corner office exists. In this quirk of architect Oscar Niemeyer, the soul of the United Nations is encapsulated. Equality at all costs. Such a proposition remains the antithesis of Hitlerism. In this most literal sense, the United Nations carries on mankind’s fight against despotism and hatred. It does so with vigor, determination, resilience, and absolute stolidity of purpose – in much the same way the United States conducted its war against another murderous dictator: Saddam Hussein. He killed millions of his own people for various discriminatory reasons. The walls of his rape rooms sweat with memories of a thousand defiled women. And yet, Kofi Annan called this war “illegal.” He disapproved and fought tooth and nail to stop the United States from executing its battle against the tyrant in Baghdad. “Why?” seems to be a fair question.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, it was to recreate the Empire of Babylon—at least, that is what he told his citizens. In truth, there is no singular reason why his army laid waste to 30,000 Kuwaiti villages. It was a crime against humanity fueled as much by greed as by hatred, and led by a man whose political internship, as it were, occurred when he was 22, and was one of the gunmen who botched the assassination attempt on an Iraqi ruler, Abdel Kassem. Since that time, Hussein’s hands have reddened with—by conservative estimates—more than one million deaths of innocent Iraqis, most of them religious dissidents who did not share his sect of Islam.

In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the long arm of UN bureaucracy sprang to inaction. Within hours, resolution 660 was passed, which told Saddam Hussein that the Security Council did not like very much what he was doing, and would he please stop. Several days later, resolution 661 was passed. It introduced economic sanctions, which starved Iraqis without hindering Hussein’s war machine. As the UN doctrine of ‘all states were created equal’ fell apart before the world’s eyes, George Bush began to feel pressure to right the wrong. Resolution after resolution went by. 678 reminded Saddam about 660. 686 asked that prisoners be released. 687 was a list of weapons that Iraq could no longer have. 688 condemned Hussein’s repression of his people. 707 reminded Saddam about 687. Scattered resolutions from 715 to 1441—over a period of more than a decade—demanded that Saddam submit to inspections.

Every order from this world council was ignored, subverted, minimized, or otherwise spat upon by Saddam Hussein.

In response, a broad coalition, led by the United States, forced Saddam’s plunderers out of Kuwait. During this time, broad economic sanctions attempted to punish Saddam for his tyrannical rule. But content to live fatly as his subjugated peons starved, it became apparent that trade sanctions were doubly hurting the Iraqis oppressed by Saddam. A solution was devised that would re-open the pathways of trade on a limited basis. It was called the Oil for Food program.

“This is a victory for the poorest of the poor of Iraq, for the women and children,” then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in 1996. Theoretically, Oil for Food was to be just that. Instead, under the auspices of that program and over the course of the next decade, it would become readily apparent why the United Nations was unable to take proper action against the steady rise of Saddam Hussein.

If the UN’s bureaucratic coil and inherent reluctance to act dampened the First Gulf War, they nearly immobilized the second. Saddam’s actions were no different; he still had biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as confirmed by intelligence agencies and reconfirmed with countless UN reminders. And indeed, left alone for a number of years, the world’s foremost intelligence agencies agreed that Hussein most likely was developing nuclear weapons. Although post-war inspections have revealed this to be improbable, it nonetheless was properly the basis of the President’s decisions. And, with the threshold for action so low after September 11th, the decision to go to war was unavoidable. Why, then, did France and Germany so stridently oppose all military action against Iraq in 2003? Hussein had not changed; his weapons were still there. He was still murdering his own people. Public executions of suspected prostitutes continued in many town squares. The lying continued; the evasion continued. The ‘please listen to us’ Security Council resolutions continued. What had changed?

UN officials and key member countries, particularly France, had discovered one heck of a golden goose in Iraq.

In Oil for Food, much was outsourced. Program money was transferred through the Banque Nationale de Paris. The United Nations put some of the physical administrative duties to companies such as Lloyd’s Register, Cotecna, and Saybolt. These companies had important tasks, such as stopping the smuggling of weapons. Unfortunately, every single hired hand milked the United Nations for all they could. Initial audits show millions of dollars in overcharging and inexplicable payments to local Iraqi officials. None of this was detected by the United Nations until 1998, when audits were initiated on the Oil for Food program amidst growing suspicion. But Kofi Annan embargoed the audits. They were finally released in January 2005, after calls for resignation began to ring out from Capitol Hill in Washington.

Those early audits, damning though they are, belie the depth of the Oil for Food scandal. Washington politicians had been increasingly skeptical of the program, especially in the years before the Iraq War. The United States, after all, is a large financial backer of the United Nations, and it rightly expects that its capital investments be used with propriety. When the prospect emerged that the program was illegally channeling money to Iraq War opponents, the “conflict of interest” alert was sounded and Republicans began to press for investigations. Democrats ought to be doing the same, for it is in everyone’s interest to have a Security Council capable of proper action, not just economically and politically expedient action. Congressional investigations, as many as five simultaneous ones, continue, and to this day the US Department of Justice has issued the only indictments in connection with the Oil for Food program. But the existence of these investigations was enough to make Kofi Annan play along.

So in April of 2004, Annan created the Volcker Committee, led by Paul Volcker and three investigators. It is important to note that two of Volcker’s investigators have resigned in recent weeks, specifically citing their boss’s refusal to follow important leads in the Oil for Food investigation: leads pointing upward. However, the demure Volcker investigations, limited and protectionist as they are, raise serious questions about the credibility of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, and certain governments in Western Europe. Questions that directly affect, via the United Nations Security Council, the ability of the United States to wage war when necessary, and the bedrock upon which our peacekeeping citadel was built.

Just some of the findings from the Volcker Committee’s report: Kofi Annan’s then Chief of Staff, Iqbal Riza ordered the shredding of thousands of UN documents between April and December of 2004. All the documents were from the years 1997-1999, and came from the Chef de Cabinet records, those of the UN chief of staff. Mr. Riza’s retirement was announced by Kofi Annan on January 15th, 2005, just after Riza admitted to the Volcker committee that he had authorized the mass destruction of Oil for Food documents. Also revealed is a close relationship between Kofi Annan and the Cotecna Company, one of the implicated grafters. Although Annan told the Volcker committee that he never met with company officials before awarding Cotecna the inspection contract for Oil for Food, the report found that Annan met with the company’s owner, Elie Massey, twice before choosing to give his company the business. The second of those meetings was orchestrated by Annan’s son Kojo, who is also deeply implicated in the Oil for Food scandal.

Six companies are being intensively probed to find out what influence Kojo may have had on them. Cotecna is at the center of this controversy, where he was on the payroll for about two years. Afterwards, Kojo ostensibly worked as a consultant, but one odd financial transaction makes his dealings suspect: in 1999, a 25 year-old Kojo Annan donated $235,000 to a Swiss soccer club called Vevey Sports. Kojo was subsequently elected president of that club, but never attended a single match. At the time, his monthly salary was $2,500. By their own admission, the Annan family is of modest financial means. How a young man would be in a position to donate a quarter million dollars to a soccer club in a foreign country (the same country where Cotecna operated) is incomprehensible given Kofi and Kojo’s testimony to the investigations. Indeed, the latest Volcker report condemns Kojo for actively conspiring with Cotecna to conceal his relationship with the company.

Benon Sevan, the man who accused America of being “stingy” with tsunami aid, solicited and received on behalf of African Middle East Petroleum Inc. several million barrels of allocations of oil from 1998 to 2001. Sevan personally received roughly $1.5 million: the oil contracts he arranged were worth $144 million. Former Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali is implicated, as are French officials, for the original selection of Banque Nationale de Paris to manage the program’s finances. BNP, it has been revealed, was not the lowest bidder for the job, and UN regulations require the selection of the lowest bidder. Boutros-Ghali has also been linked to South Korean Tongsun Park, who has been indicted for personally accepting millions from Hussein to act as his agent inside the United States. Russian officials are also suspected of participating in what weapons inspector Charles Duelfer described as a massive program wherein Saddam gave oil vouchers to Russian, French, and Chinese officials and journalists in exchange for aid. The vouchers could then be sold at a profit.

Other implicated men include former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. He was complicit in holding in escrow additional Oil for Food funds in offshore accounts so that Saddam’s kickbacks would go unnoticed.

Kofi Annan oversaw the deliberate and dangerous graft of all of these men: he had even hired a great many of them. With every extra dollar that went into Saddam’s pocket, and every additional corpuscle of oil into bribed and complicit nations, a terrorist was enriched. It happened on Annan’s watch and, as has been shown, he avoided and interrupted investigation at every step of the way.

Many observers, particularly financial journalists at the Wall Street Journal, have come close to calling Oil for Food the largest financial scandal in the history of the world. With the amount of corruption already discovered, and the undue political influences of even those investigations, that title may yet be merited. The United Nations is an enterprise, to borrow Shakespeare’s words, “of great pitch and moment.” It was indeed to be mankind’s citadel against another world war. Instead, it has become the Tower of Babel that Churchill warned us of. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, and her ability to wage war—and her very sovereignty—is at the mercy of the United Nations. A union which, in the well-intentioned but ultimately mad ideal of equality among nations, has shown itself not only incapable of action where action is needed, but of reckless impedance of great and just goals under the banner of money, greed, politics, and power. In coming years, there will be a handful of new democracies on the doormat of the Secretariat building on the West Side of Manhattan. Poor huddled masses, their yearnings fulfilled, will have a handful of new UN representatives. And for the first time, they will be representative. It is a sick irony that the world’s newest democracies shall come despite the efforts of the United Nations, that cesspool of corruption and incompetence that croons its greatness under the baton of Kofi Annan. And it is a cycle that will continue, unless the United States of America once again thrusts the world upon her shoulders and changes things for the better.