The Quiet Oil-for-Food Scandal

Last week, the Independent Committee investigating the Oil-for-Food program (OFF) released its final report detailing how Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed just under two percent from the otherwise successful relief effort by charging kickbacks and "inland transportation" fees to companies doing business with Iraq.

The small group of conservative writers who I've dubbed the "Scandal Pimps" have been less enthusiastic about the release of this report than they've been about those that preceded it. The day after the release, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that the report didn't really add anything new, it just filled in some details.

What they characterized as "details" were actually the names of over 2,000 companies that paid bribes to the Hussein regime for a shot at buying Iraq's oil, selling spare parts for its oil infrastructure or providing humanitarian goods for a population starving under the U.S./ U.K.-led sanctions regime.

The Scandal Pimps have been low-key because the final report of the Committee -- known as the Volcker Committee for its chair, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker -- offers further evidence that what they've worked so hard -- and so successfully -- to portray as a massive UN scandal has always been a relatively modest corporate scandal, interesting more for the players involved than because of its scale.

The details the Journal editors referred to include the process by which Saddam and his cronies squeezed what were effectively bribes out of multinational corporations, great and small…

he Scandal Pimps are unlikely to delve too deeply into the final report because it reveals that some of our leading corporations, and the vaunted "entrepenuers" that outlets like the Washington Times always crow about, weren't in the least bit reticent to pay off a brutal dictator accused of mass murder in order to pump up their bottom lines.

Even more damning to the conservative worldview is that the United States' "strategic class" was deeply involved. In fact, profits from sales under OFF program that were lubricated with illicit payments to Saddam Hussein found their way into both the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns of 2004…


http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/27792/

Ok, so we're not exactly surprised to learn that this scandal is more about corporate greed than about a corrupt UN (although who says the two are mutually exclusive, anyway?).

But digging deeper, you find that a disturbing number of players--including some of the "good guys"--stood to benefit from this corruption.

Well, maybe I'll have a look at the actual report, which is available (in all 16 megs of its glory) here:

http://www.iic-offp.org/documents/IIC%20Final%20Report%2027Oct2005.pdf

wonder how many people have actually read it. More importantly, I wonder how many of the whiny RW "scandal pimps" have actually read it.

http://www.iic-offp.org/story27oct05.htm

Here is the 8 page summary.

http://www.iic-offp.org/documents/Final%20Report%2027Oct05/IIC%20Final%20Report%20-%20Chapter%20One.pdf

And the homepage.

http://www.iic-offp.org/

They were pissing and moaning endlessly about how Kofi Annan was headed for jail, yadda yadda yadda.

How do we make hay now that the sun is shining?