Lining Saddam's Pockets

I am reading an excellent book entitled "Backstabbing for Beginners" by C. Michael Soussan. It is about the UN's Oil for Food program. Soussan was, like many of us, an idealistic new college graduate, who went to work for the program in 1997.

Soussan explains how the program was supposed to work. Iraq would sign a contract for the sale of oil, and send the contract to the UN in New York for approval. After the UN approved the price of oil, a tanker would fill up with the crude. Payment was made in dollars into a UN-controlled account in a French bank in New York. One-third of the proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil would go toward compensation for the destruction Iraq had created during the Gulf War, and the remaining two-thirds would pay for humanitarian goods to be delivered to the people of Iraq.

Of course, that is not how the proceeds were distributed. Saddam Hussein filled his own pockets with billions of dollars. Soussan describes how Hussein succeeded in "turning the UN into a defensive shield against the world's largest superpower." The humanitarian mission was a masquerade. The UN never stood up to the unspeakably evil bully Hussein. As Soussan writes, "That one of the world's most vicious human rights abusers finally succeeded in turning international law to his advantage remains an astounding achievement, in the grand scheme of history."

The Iranian mullahs certainly learned from watching Saddam. They are using the UN similarly to the way Saddam did, in my opinion.

Soussan was privy to face-to-face meetings with top UN officials and Saddam's henchmen, and he writes about it with humor, irony, and penetrating insight. Saddam's corrupt minions had one job: to cut him in on all the proceeds. The Minister of Health resold medicine to pharmacies in Jordan, thereby causing pain, suffering and death to sick Iraqis, who were deprived of life-saving medicines. $1.9 billion in various humanitarian goods were diverted by various Saddam-controlled ministries.

The combination of UN sanctions, on the one hand, and a totalitarian dictator lining his pockets, on the other hand, ensured that Iraqis were deprived of clean water, food, and medicine, condemning them to a life of despair. We destroyed their entire infrastructure, then left Saddam in power! In 1991 we bombed "every bridge, every water station, and anything that looked remotely like a factory." So, we deprived Saddam of a functional society, rather than to deprive that society from a dysfunctional Saddam."

Soussan continues, "It was Iraq's people, not Saddam and his henchmen, who suffered most from (Desert Storm), and the policy of sanctions that followed." President George H.W. Bush famously said,"We do not have a quarrel with the people of Iraq." Soussan asks, "If we didn't have a quarrel with the people of Iraq, why were they the primary victims of our policies?

And we wonder why Iraqis had so much mistrust for Bush's son nine years after Desert Storm?