There’s an ongoing scandal here about how the Australian Wheat Board allegedly paid bribes to Saddam Hussein’s government in return for wheat sales, breached the oil-for-food program, and generally did the sort of things you’d expect any company operating in a third-world Dictatorship to do.
I just can’t understand why anyone gives a shit- yet every time I turn on the freaking radio, it’s stories about the “AWB Scandal” or the “Cole Enquiry” or which Minister/Board Member has resigned.
Really, who cares?
More importantly, so what if they paid bribes to Saddam Hussein’s government? If I ran a business and was dealing with a country like Iraq or somewhere in Africa, certain “Operational Expenses” would seem inevitable… so why the sudden outrage over it here?
I think some people are still having trouble dealing with the cognitive dissonance arising from how the major western countries treated Saddam’s regime over the years. We knew by the early 80’s that Saddam was massacring the Kurds, and yet we continued to purchase oil from his until the Kuwait war. We knew full well that the money we spent on Iraqi oil was helping to keep his regime in business, yet we spent it anyway. And we gave him weapons and other support throughout the Iran-Iraq War. In neocon thinking, apparently, it was okay to support and encourage Saddam and also okay to wage war against Saddam; the only unacceptable course of action was to leave him alone.
Making major noise about this latest scandal or the oil-for-food business is a way for certain people to rationalize their own hypocricy. The people who have fits about giving Saddam a few million are silent about giving Saddam a few billion. In some cases it’s the same people.
Many people do not consider this to be expected, or acceptable, business practices. It’s like dumping your toxic waste, operating a sweatshop, or concealing defective and dangerous merchandise.
In this case, they helped support a murderous dictator by violating a program intended to provide food for his citizens. Compare that to the Enron accounting scandal and tell me which one people should get pissed off about.
So why single out one tyranny when there are so many others? Three quarters of the UN membership would be a fair estimate.
I don’t expect Australia or any other non dictatorship to refuse to deal or trade with tyrannies simply on the grounds that they only pay lip service to human rights.
If you wish to deal with criminals then you should expect to play under the criminal’s rules. That would include bribery.
Covertly funding a regime both before and after we make war on it, and that’s not a problem for you? Stealing food out of the mouths of starving Iraqi babies, not a problem either?
Supposedly though, the wheat was to go to the Iraqi people with no benefit to the criminal concerned. It was the very dealing with the criminal that is the problem.
I do, however. You want to do business in certain countries, you have to pay “Consultancy Fees” to The Minister For Parks & Wildlife’s nephew’s son unless you want your shipments to spend months stuck on the wharves due to “Customs Irregularities” or sudden, unexpected labour shortages.
Well, we have a transaction that begins in Australia, with Australian companies, and ends in Iraq. It violates a trade agreement that, presumably, Australia’s government agreed to uphold.
Perhaps it’s getting more press than it should, but I fail to see how this situation is one that merits a wink and a nod instead of an investigation and jail time. If breaking the law is the only way to do business, then doing business means you may get in trouble and go to jail. If you want to risk that in order to boost your revenue, go right ahead, but it doesn’t make the action any less of a crime. Lots of crimes are done in order for people to get themselves more money, it’s rare that the need for money gets the criminal a free pass.
No, but I might be persuaded to sell them to a country at war with New Zealand.
(I’m kidding, folks!)
Seriously though, No, I wouldn’t sell arms to a country at war with Australia.
But AWB weren’t selling ex-Russian Army AK-47s to Saddam Hussein, they were bodgying up contracts for wheat sales and bribing people, which is not the same thing. Bear in mind Australia was not actually at war with Saddam Hussein when any of this happened, either.
After all, lots of people in the US dealt with the Germans up to and during WWII, and we don’t hear much about that today (unless you watch a lot of The Hitler Channel, that is).
Have you seen Lord of War at all? Great movie, which raises some interesting questions itself.
I certainly don’t care about the AWB scandal, but I don’t expect anyone overseas to care about most US scandals either. And I love Lord of War (one of only two Nicolas Cage films I really like)
“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?”
But you don’t see it as a problem that as late as late 2002 and early 2003 the AWB were the single largest buster of sanctions (ie source of cash for Saddam) at the same time as the US and its allies (ie Australia) were facing Saddam down and preparing for a war that started in March 2003?
If you think there is a meaningful difference between selling AK-47’s to Saddam and giving him the cash with which to do so, you’re dreamin’, son.
Some people were bad so we’re not bad if we are bad too? That makes sense to you?
This is not just paying bribes, though it was certainly that. This is paying money in breach of international sanctions Australia supposedly supported. The same government that got us into a war with a dictator on the basis he was:
(a) working on uber weapons and
(b) oppressing his citizens
to an extent so bad we had to get involved in a war to depose him, also gave the hidden nod to giving him $220m that (due to the sanctions we were the biggest breacher of) he would otherwise have found hard to come by, and that doesn’t bother you?
You can of course argue all day about whether Saddam would have failed to survive or been effectively weakened by the sanctions if Australia and others (but most of all Australia) hadn’t breached them, but if there is even a viable argument to that effect (and there is) the AWB’s actions helped cause a war in which our allies not to mention Iraqis are currently dying.
That doesn’t bother you?
Don’t get me wrong: I know one of the legal advisors to the AWB, I know people who know those from the AWB who are probably going to go to jail. I have some sympathy with the idea that there are certain things that one has to do to do business in the 3rd world. But this is a whole heck of a lot more than that.
The people who should be enforcing policy, and who are expected to have responsibility beyond “whatever it takes to earn a buck” are the government. The sad thing is that the teflon style of administration we have these days means that no one in the government will cop anything over this, and the general populace are too ignorant, apathetic and amoral to punish them at the ballot box.
