"Be your own person. Think for yourself. And if you see something rotten, don't be afraid to speak out."

I finally finished Michael Soussan's book about his years working in the Oil for Food program at the UN. The book, Backstabbing for Beginners has a surprise ending, which I will not reveal, but there are lots of other points in his last chapters that I want to highlight.

Soussan writes that it was a mistake for the United States to present the war against Saddam as one waged for "disarmament." The UN charter only authorizes intervention if one nation is attacking another. Soussan's example:

"If the UN Charter were applied domestically - say to a village - then every head of household in that village would have the right to beat his wife (assuming a male dominates the household) and starve the children, and the society would not have the right to intervene. Only if a person attacked another family's house could he be restrained, and even then he might be left in charge - as was the case in 1991, when Saddam was left as the ruler of Iraq."

Thus, the U.S. and its allies had to "invade Iraq to prove why it was necessary to invade Iraq." The chief weapons inspector for the UN added, "It is somewhat fascinating to me that you can have 100 percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction (being in Iraq) and zero percent certainty about where they are."

The truth, of course, was that President Bush wanted to topple the dictator, Saddam Hussein, and end his 24-year reign of brutal suppression of the Iraqi people. He wanted to create a democracy in the Middle East, and make it possible for the people of Iraq to live in freedom.

Back to the Oil for Food program. On January 25, 2004 an article was published in Al-Mada, an independent newspaper in Baghdad, which contained a secret list of 270 bribe-takers from all over the world. Saddam's secret contracts with these 270 bribe-takers enabled him to develop "the biggest operation in modern history for buying loyalty and influence around the world."

Right there on the list was "The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Syria-based terrorist organization that had claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Israel." Of course, Saddam himself had been paying $30,000 to $50,000 to families of suicide bombers. Even though this was an American election year, Bush did not make much of an issue about it, and Soussan suspects that some of the players were closely related to the Bush team.

I was saddened to read that although Russia and France were the favored nations receiving Saddam's bribes, American and British oil companies tried to get in on the action, by dealing with Saddam through their offices in France. Chevron, who had a board member named Condoleeza Rice, was one of the U.S. companies buying Iraq's oil, and "allowed kickbacks of more than $20 million dollars to find their way back into Saddam's pocket." Chevron was fined in a U.S. court, after it admitted "it should have known" in 2000 that kickbacks could be going to Saddam. Soussan corrects that statement, writing, "Chevron knew, and the woman who would soon be named secretary of state after serving on the board's policy committee was probably aware of the dirty business as well." The policy committee oversaw areas of potential political concern for the company.

Dick Cheney had been the CEO of Haliburton. Haliburton was not on the list of companies that took bribes, but "Haliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts for more than $73 million to provide Iraq with oil industry spare parts. The question is, had the contracts with Saddam included the usual kickbacks?

Now that the Oil for Food program was being looked into by investigators and journalists worldwide, Michael Soussan was glad he had made the decision to leave the UN a year or so earlier. "I was glad I was no longer working for an organization that valued its employees more dearly for their ability to hide their eyes, cover their ears, and shut their mouths in the face of gross incompetence and corruption." He wrote an oped piece which was published March 8, 2004 in the Wall Street Journal. He soon received a phone call from a highly placed secretary at the UN, warning him that "they're going to attack you, Michael. They are asking for your personnel file."

Soussan concludes his book by saying that he still believes in efforts to make the UN more transparent. Now, in his teaching job at NYU's Center for Global Affairs, he encourages his students to "Be your own person. Think for yourself. And if you see something rotten, don't be afraid to speak out."