Wednesday, February 2, 2005
CNN is finally interested in pre-war Iraqi oil smuggling. Yeah, really. To show the futility of economic sanctions? Uh...no. To show how many other country's positions and opposition were based on economic benefit, rather all the supposed oh so much more nuanced and intellectual arguments we heard? Well...no. As a demonstration of how impotent the UN is to enforce its own sanctions? Heh...no. An object lesson in how UN members agree to one thing and do another? Ha!
No, CNN is interested in oil smuggling because they believe that now they can spin it to discredit the United States and exonerate the institution of the UN - and it doesn't hurt that they have a couple of Democratic committee members' voices to amplify. That's bonus points.
CNN.com - Documents: U.S. condoned Iraq oil smuggling
The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S. government and the United Nations for years.
The unclassified State Department documents sent to congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign policy divulge that the United States deemed such sales to be in the "national interest," even though they generated billions of dollars in unmonitored revenue for Saddam's regime.
The trade also generated a needed source of oil and commerce for Iraq's major trading partners, Turkey and Jordan.
"It was in the national security interest, because we depended on the stability in Turkey and the stability in Jordan in order to encircle Saddam Hussein," Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, told CNN when asked about the memo documents.
"We had a great amount of cooperation with the Jordanians on the intelligence side, and with the Turks as well, so we were getting value out of the relationship," said Walker, who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
The memos obtained by CNN explain why both administrations waived restrictions on U.S. economic aid to those countries for engaging in otherwise prohibited trade with Iraq...
...Rep. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, one of five panels probing the oil-for-food program, told CNN the United States was "complicit in undermining" the U.N. sanctions on Iraq.
"How is it that you stand on a moral footing to go after the U.N. when they're responsible for 15 percent maybe of the ill-gotten gains, and we were part and complicit of him getting 85 percent of the money?" Menendez asked.
"Where was our voice on the committee that was overseeing this on the Security Council?
"The reality is that we were either silent or complicit, and that is fundamentally wrong."...
We were part of, limited by, playing the same silly games and stuck in the quagmire of a fundamentally flawed organization, Mr. Menendez. It's all a bit of a...tautology...isn't it? The USA is a member of the Security Council so of course, by definition, the USA is going to be involved in some way in any mistakes the organization makes. We don't own it. We don't dictate there. We do what we can.
But Earth to CNN! You didn't need to go digging to find documents about this. Everyone's known about it all for some time now! Clinton Administration official Ken Pollack wrote about it in his book years ago. I suppose the time wasn't ripe to headline it back then, though...when it might have helped the people understand why we just might end up at war...oh so much more useful now.
Update: In some straight-news reporting, looks like tomorrow's Journal should be interesting: Volcker report will slam U.N.
"We have found in each case that the procurement process was tainted, failing to follow the established rules of the organization designed to assure fairness and accountability," Volcker writes in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.
Volcker was appointed by the United Nations to head an independent probe of the now-defunct program that was intended to ease the hardship of ordinary Iraqis under 1990 sanctions.
He also said that evidence was "conclusive" that Benon Sevan, the undersecretary-general in charge of the U.N. program, had steered oil contracts to certain firms, "an irreconcilable conflict of interest."
But Volcker said that allegations of conflict of interest by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose son Kojo had worked in West Africa for a firm under contract to the United Nations in Iraq, would not be part of a preliminary report to be released on Thursday.
In case I need to point out the difference between these stories in order to head off the call that CNN can't win no matter what - one is a report of something that's just happening, the other is a story CNN is creating for themselves ("Look at the documents we found!").
