Remember Oil-For-Food?

In the rush of Katrina-related news, it's all we could do to keep up with the Roberts nomination and the war. Everything else, for me at least, has seemed to slip away -- including some interim reporting on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal. The final report of the Volker investigation is due out soon, so the interim findings are important.

Fortunately, Janet Albrechtsen, writing in The Australian, has an excellent piece that will bring you up to date in just one click. Here's an excerpt:

The evidence so far suggests that half of the 4500 companies that took part in the $US110 billion oil-for-food program - the world's largest humanitarian program - were paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein. That's a lot of fraud and corruption under Annan's watch. Were he the chief executive of a public company, he would be booted out before you could say humanitarian relief.

But were the UN a public company, its directors -- otherwise known as Security Council members -- might also find themselves turfed out. The Security Council created and supervised the oil-for-food program. British and American negotiators let Saddam choose to whom he sold oil and which goods Iraq would buy in return. Oil-for-food contracts went to the Security Council 661 Committee for approval. Moreover, despite the UN raising specific concerns about dubious pricing, none of the members, which included the US, knocked back a contract based on corrupt pricing practices.

As James Traub wrote in The New Republic in February, the five permanent members of the Security Council were making political decisions according to their own priorities. "Officials from the major countries understood the game in all its complexity and cynicism," says Traub. "It was ugly, but it worked."

And that is the UN's central flaw. The UN's governing council comprises countries that make decisions based on one fact alone: their self-interest. Decisions may be couched in the feel-good, sound-nice language of some higher good. But in the end, no country makes a decision not in its self-interest.

h/t Real Clear Politics