That’s right. It’s not like multinational corruption at the highest levels for billions of dollars is a big deal. Nor does it matter if it undermines and betrays the honorable deaths and sacrifice of the many americans who fought in the first gulf war. Nor does it matter that it may have contributed to the necessity of fighting a second, bloody, and highly controversial and divisive war. Nor does it matter that those who profited most seem to have a high correllation with those that opposed this second conflict.
You are quite right. There is nothing to see here in this Oil for Food thing. Just move along. It’s not important.
We can trust you to keep us focussed on what really is important, like Harkens wherein the President is alleged to have done a questionable trade for a couple of hundred thousand fifteen years or so ago. That’s where we need to focus our attention! That’s worth twelve pages.
The obviously poorly managed Oil for Food program seems to be wildly popular as a stalking horse for UN-haters who want to see the organization dissolved, and I’m guessing that the OP is at least sympathetic to that viewpoint, but I don’t see anything particularly wrong with his asking the questions he did, loaded as some of them may be.
It certainly shows that an approval process in which program managers cannot capture indications that kickbacks are being paid from seller to buyer is indeed deeply flawed. I point out, however, that the linked article mainly deals with instances of corruption by the Iraqi government and companies buying oil from said government, through the program, not so much by program administrators themselves. I did not see, in that article at least, accusations that UN officials themselves were accepting kickbacks, and in fact the article specifically states:
Therefore, I would not say that this does not necessarily show a serious flaw in the overall concept of the UN, if that is what the OP is asking, but it does suggest that performing oversight of complex economic negotiations of this type appears beyond the skills of the UN to effectively manage.
I think, as someone mentioned, that not allowing Saddam to choose the businesses he would deal with would have been a good start. Otherwise, I’m not an expert in this area, so I’d prefer to hear the OP’s notions on this subject first.
That companies hungry for profits and despotic leaders hungry for bribes can usually find a way to come to an agreement, especially if the oversight mechanism for these transactions is flawed.
I am unaware of any precedent that provides for the United States to invade countries purely on the basis that governmental corruption may exist there. If Iraq itself is the precedent, I await an explanation as to why we are not at this moment positioning troops for the upcoming invasion of, say, Zimbabwe.
Why, prosecute them under the laws of the countries in which they reside and/or do business, of course. I believe the linked article mentions that exactly that is being done, in at least some cases.
I suppose another possibility might be to grant the UN enforcement power to go after persons or corporate entities attempting to arrange shady deals via UN programs, but I’m guessing that’s not the sort of ‘reform’ that critics of the organization have in mind.
Sympathetic to having the UN dissolved? No, I wouldn’t say that. Sympathetic to some major reforms…certainly. What those reforms should/can be? I don’t know…thats why I started the debate to see what others thought.
Were some of the questions loaded? Certainly…I intended them to be. I also haven’t answered any of them yet btw.
I didn’t actually as (or mention) UN corruption…I asked if the system was flawed. The UN had oversight over the Oil for Food program…obviously the way they set up and ran the system was flawed. Whether or not it was flawed due to corruption, incompetence or some other reason I don’t know if thats been completely established at this time, nor am I making a comment about it here. That it WAS flawed though is pretty much a slam dunk.
No, the OP wasn’t really asking about the ‘overall concept of the UN’…I don’t have a problem with the concept. I agree with your assessment that it MIGHT be that such oversight is beyond what the UN can safely be given (or take) as a task.
Ah, someone finally took a shot at this question. I agree that it doesn’t provide any excuse for the US to have invaded Iraq (though of course this wasn’t either the reason given nor the actual reason for the invasion). However, this wasn’t really what I was getting at. I suppose what I wanted was some speculation as to the viability of the status quo (i.e. sanctions kept in place, Oil for Food program rolling on).
At any rate, thanks for the response.
The sanctions appear to have been relatively effective in their stated objectives, which as I understand it, were to punish Iraq for the invasion of Kuwait and inhibit Saddam’s capacity to wage war against his neighbors. From that standpoint they most likely could have been maintained nearly indefinitely.
Yep, Oil for Food was flawed from the git-go, but the intentions if not the execution (reduce the suffering of the Iraqi people under the sanctions) was reasonably sound, IMO. Corrupt as it may have been, at some point, probably not much later than it did, the corruption would have become apparent anyway, and whatever the the ultimate cost of the corruption involved, it is surely less than the cost of the invasion.
Of course no one in this thread or in the U.S. government ever weighed the costs of invasion against the costs of Oil for Food corruption as a means to decide whether or not to invade.
I don’t think the corruption completely undermined the sanctions, and I don’t think the corruption was ultimately going to bring about the end of the sanctions.
However the corruption did show that various corporations were probably interested in seeing the sanctions lifted for economic purposes. And I think various politicians in other countries were sympathetic to this as well. So I do think in the face of mounting diplomatic pressure the U.N. sanctions against Iraq were not capable of being maintained indefinitely, too many political leaders were getting tired of them. Functionally the sanctions weren’t going to collapse, but politically I think support for them was eroding pretty quickly by the end of the 1990s.
Did I? I thought I asked a question to get some feedback. I didn’t know that I actually said one way or the other, in the OP. And of course when I responded to your last post I said ‘(though of course this wasn’t either the reason given nor the actual reason for the invasion).’…which seems to me to be saying that I DON’T think ‘U.S. government ever weighed the costs of invasion against the costs of Oil for Food corruption as a means to decide whether or not to invade.’ Why this would still be unclear to you I don’t know.
Uh, I think there’s plenty of misunderstanding to go around here. I have not at any point suggested that the the US ever took a presumed failure of Oil for Food as a pretext for the invasion. It was the OP’s question that linked the two in the first place, not me. I really have nothing further to say on that subject.
Perhaps it’s merely a case of an impressionable kaylasdad99 having read too much SJ Perelman during the eighties, but I have this notion of the concept of baksheesh being pervasive (and pretty much accepted as a fact of life) in all areas of economic activity in the Middle East. Does anyone have a ballpark estimate of what percentage of economic activity is accounted for by baksheesh in the Middle East generally, and in pre-invasion Iraq particularly? The answer will help me to put into perspective just how significant the dollar amounts under discussion are.
Of course, if I’m merely allowing an entirely invalid stereotype to lead me into fruitless musings, I would be grateful if someone would dispel that for me, so I can avoid wasting time on it.
It’s probably a truism that everything that every (for-profit) corporation is interested in seeing happen, or bringing about, or influencing, is for economic purposes.
None in particular. But it would be interesting to speculate on what non-economic reasons a corporation might have for being interested in bringing about the end of sanctions, and how it might use corruption to influence that end.
I think it shows just how naieve many developed nations populations are when considering the interplay between finances and political power in the developing world. 1.8 billion / 64 billion = 0.028125 or 2.8% of the cash siphoned away by corruption over ~seven years(~257 million per year). When you’re talking about 1.8 billion which should have fed women and children it is pretty outrageous, but the hard-nosed realist may note that for the developing world, this is probably more status quo than abnormal. Financial transaction transparency is pretty poor outside the developed world and corruption is a fact of life. I was more suprised at the number of US and other first-world companies involved than I was at corruption in the program. First-world companies, especially publically traded companies, take big risks that independent auditors will catch them because of their financial transparency. The biggest offenders, as far as I can tell, were mostly companies from other developing nations with poor financial governance(Egypt, Vietnam, etc.).
As for the UN, I agree there should be better housekeeping, but I don’t see this as impteus for MAJOR reforms. ~3% of a program going to corruption is small change in the larger scheme of things. The UN could probably improve its administrative processes and make them more efficient and save more money than this. Certainly press charges against the bastards offering the kickbacks and receiving them, but the baby is still fine and kicking even if the bathwater is a bit murky. I would hate to see the World Food Program, UNICEF, or any number of fine UN programs get jacked around with because of this. Much like the “corrupt CEO” witch hunt in the US a couple years ago, there are some good targets but we need to understand the kind of damage these things can do in the long run to people who didn’t deserve it.
Did the corruption in the OFF program influence the politicians during the debate over the Iraq war? My feeling is no. This was really chump change in the grand scheme of things. The leaders of first-world countries award contracts of far more worth than this every day. If they thought Iraq was a threat they would not be likely to ignore it over a few million in kickbacks. I think it is still more probable that they just weren’t impressed with the Admin’s evidence than that they were deliberately discounting it so some friends could increase their net worth by a few percentage points. Just as I consider many of the “Bush started war for his Haliburton buddies” claims to be nonsense I also can’t see Chirac sacrificing French security from WMD-armed terrorists for any of his buddies. I think it is more likely that he never believed the intel on Iraq showed a realistic threat.
I’m not saying tolerate corruption. I think we should clean house, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If the Oil For Food program could have been overhauled and sanctions left in place I think that would have been enough. It is abundantly clear now that sanctions, inspections, and containment were working to sufficiently frustrate any WMD ambitions of Hussein’s regime. The UN is the place where Developed and Developing nations meet. This kind of stuff is, unfortunately, going to happen until the developing nations get their financial governance and transparency up to scratch(and even then it will just go a bit further underground and shrink).