Sunday, February 06, 2005
A Couple of 64 Billion Dollar Questions
The UN Oil-for-Food scandal is starting to get some legs. After months of collective yawning by MSM, in the face of reams of new evidence, the wall of silence that surrounds this story is showing signs of the heightening siege. Critical mass should be reached when MSM is forced to trade its ideology for its credibility.
We're not there yet though. So for the time being we'll continue to rely on the excellent investigative work of Claudia Rosett, and the bi-weekly (or so) blasts from Mark Steyn.
In Sunday's Daily Telegraph (UK), Steyn argues that, contrary to the incremental admissions by UN officials that "system failures" enabled Saddam to spread the filthy lucre so widely and deeply, it was not a failure of the system at all. That is the system itself.
[W]hat happened was utterly predictable. If I had $64 billion of my own money, I'd look after it carefully. But give someone $64 billion of other people's money to "process" and it would be surprising if some of it didn't get peeled off en route. Especially if that $64 billion gives you access to a unique supply of specially low-priced oil you can re-sell at market prices. Hire Third World bureaucrats to supervise the "processing" and you can kiss even more of it goodbye. Grant Saddam Hussein the right of approval over the bank that will run the scheme, and it's clear to all that nit-picky book-keeping will not be an overburdensome problem.
In other words, the system didn't fail. This is the transnational system, working as it usually works, just a little more so. One of the reasons I'm in favour of small government is because big government tends to be remote government, and remote government is unaccountable, and, as a wannabe world government, the UN is the remotest and most unaccountable of all. If the sentimental utopian blather ever came true and we wound up with one "world government", from an accounting department point of view, the model will be Nigeria rather than New Hampshire.
If the Oil-for-Food scam weren't a big enough threat to UN legitimacy, impotence before the slaughter of tens of thousands in the Sudan would seem to be. Yet as with its efforts at tsunami relief, the UN is still long on committee formation and short on relief. Steyn:
If Paul Volcker's preliminary report on Oil-for-Food dealt with the organisation's unofficial interests, the UN's other report of the week accurately captured their blithe insouciance to their official one. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the Polly Toynbee-Clare Short-approved multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what's going on in Darfur. They've just reported back that it's not genocide.
That's great news, isn't it? For as yet another Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared in December: "Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated." So thank goodness this isn't genocide. Instead, it's just 70,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group – which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, and Polly and Clare don't have to worry their pretty little heads about it.
That's the transnational establishment's alternative to Bush and Howard [Australian Prime Minister, John Howard]: appoint a committee that agrees on the need to do nothing.
We're not there yet though. So for the time being we'll continue to rely on the excellent investigative work of Claudia Rosett, and the bi-weekly (or so) blasts from Mark Steyn.
In Sunday's Daily Telegraph (UK), Steyn argues that, contrary to the incremental admissions by UN officials that "system failures" enabled Saddam to spread the filthy lucre so widely and deeply, it was not a failure of the system at all. That is the system itself.
[W]hat happened was utterly predictable. If I had $64 billion of my own money, I'd look after it carefully. But give someone $64 billion of other people's money to "process" and it would be surprising if some of it didn't get peeled off en route. Especially if that $64 billion gives you access to a unique supply of specially low-priced oil you can re-sell at market prices. Hire Third World bureaucrats to supervise the "processing" and you can kiss even more of it goodbye. Grant Saddam Hussein the right of approval over the bank that will run the scheme, and it's clear to all that nit-picky book-keeping will not be an overburdensome problem.
In other words, the system didn't fail. This is the transnational system, working as it usually works, just a little more so. One of the reasons I'm in favour of small government is because big government tends to be remote government, and remote government is unaccountable, and, as a wannabe world government, the UN is the remotest and most unaccountable of all. If the sentimental utopian blather ever came true and we wound up with one "world government", from an accounting department point of view, the model will be Nigeria rather than New Hampshire.
If the Oil-for-Food scam weren't a big enough threat to UN legitimacy, impotence before the slaughter of tens of thousands in the Sudan would seem to be. Yet as with its efforts at tsunami relief, the UN is still long on committee formation and short on relief. Steyn:
If Paul Volcker's preliminary report on Oil-for-Food dealt with the organisation's unofficial interests, the UN's other report of the week accurately captured their blithe insouciance to their official one. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the Polly Toynbee-Clare Short-approved multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what's going on in Darfur. They've just reported back that it's not genocide.
That's great news, isn't it? For as yet another Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared in December: "Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated." So thank goodness this isn't genocide. Instead, it's just 70,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group – which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, and Polly and Clare don't have to worry their pretty little heads about it.
That's the transnational establishment's alternative to Bush and Howard [Australian Prime Minister, John Howard]: appoint a committee that agrees on the need to do nothing.
# posted by mds : 8:18 PM
