The oil-for-food rip off.(United States' humanitarian programme for Iraq)

ITEM: Years after the United Nations oil-for-food scheme in Iraq became a huge embarrassment, the UN is still congratulating itself over the program, saying on its website: "United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has praised the Oil-for-Food Programme for accomplishing one of the largest, most complex and unusual tasks ever entrusted to the Secretariat." Annan told the Security Council that the scheme "was the only humanitarian programme ever to have been funded entirely from resources belonging to the nation it was designed to help. He said that in nearly seven years of operation, the Programme had been required to meet 'an almost impossible series of challenges.' "

CORRECTION: The UN oil-for-food program was no humanitarian success story. It was unadulterated, institutionalized fraud. The United Nations presided over, as one Wall Street Journal writer put it, "the biggest fraud in the history of relief," while collecting $1.4 billion in commissions. The scheme enriched Saddam Hussein's cronies, eroded sanctions, and helped the dictator rearm.

Only an easily duped UN apologist or someone with terminal self-delusion would buy into the design of the oil-for-food program--whereby the supposedly defeated dictator of Iraq earned profits by selling oil, which would be used to ease the suffering of the Iraqi populace, while permitting an embargo to be maintained. Saddam got to choose the customers. The results were predictable. Saddam sold oil below market value. The buyers resold those "allocations," at a large profit, to third parties--with payments kicked back to the dictator and his allies. The UN covered up the details of the transactions, making the fraud safe and easy.

Between 1997 and 2003, Kofi Annan's crew approved more than $100 billion in business for Saddam. The Iraqi dictatorship got more than $10 billion in illegal revenues from the UN-run program, as estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office. Saddam, meanwhile, was also smuggling additional oil out of Iraq through neighboring countries.

UN advocates would have people believe that this scandal was happening unbeknownst to Kofi Annam though people close to him profited enormously. His own son grew rich through a related UN contract given to the son's employer. Even the director of the oil-for-food program was implicated. Undersecretary-General Benon Sevan, an Annan protege, allegedly made about $1 million by selling 9.3 million barrels of oil allotted to him by Saddam. Sevan has been charged with steering contracts and receiving large amounts ...