Publication:The New York Sun; Date:Apr 26, 2004; Section:Editorial & Opinion; Page:11

Thinking the Unthinkable

on why it’s time for America to take a deep breath and abandon the United Nations

Mark Steyn

‘War without the U.N. is unthinkable,” pronounced Polly Toynbee, grande dame of Britain’s Guardian, a year ago, just before it happened.

For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the United Nations is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the U.N. imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking.

No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organization’s sunny utopian image somehow endures.

Say the initials “U.N.” to your average member of Ms. Toynbee’s legions of the unthinking and they conjure up neither U.N. participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the U.N. refugee extortion racket in Kenya, nor the U.N. cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa, nor U.N. complicity in massacres, but some misty Austin Powers–era Unesco cultural event compered by the late Audrey Hepburn and featuring photogenic children of many lands.

So the question now is whether the U.N. Oil-for-Food program is just another of those things that slip down the memory hole, and we all go back to parroting the soothing lullaby that “only the U.N. can bring legitimacy to Iraq/Afghanistan/Your Basket Case Here.”

Legitimacy seems to be the one thing the UN doesn’t bring, and I’m not just talking about the love children of U.N.-enriched Balkan hookers in Kosovo.

The scale of the U.N. Oil-for-Fraud program is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was a U.N. program designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for their people.

Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam Hussein did over $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat. In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq.

What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children touted by the anti-war crowd before the liberation is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of U.N. food in remote locations far from starving moppets. But let’s assume there’s an innocent explanation for that. Even so, by the U.N.’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

Where did all the other billions go? According to Mr. Annan himself, some $31 billion went on other “humanitarian” spending for Iraq. Such as?

Well, in 2002, the secretary-general personally expanded the program to cover other “humanitarian” categories such as “sport,” “information,”“justice” and “labor and social affairs.”

In Iraq, “sport” meant Uday’s rape rooms, and “justice” meant a mass grave out in the desert, but that’s not to say there weren’t attendant expenses involved.

So Mr. himself directly approved such “humanitarian” items as $20 million for an “Olympic sport city” (state-of-the-art rape rooms) and $50 million for Iraq’s Ministry of Information (Comical Ali’s gag writers).

As America’s Defense Contract Management Agency’s subsequent report put it after the liberation, “Some items of questionable utility for the Iraqi people (e.g., Mercedes-Benz touring sedans) were identified.”

The Jordanian supplier of schoolroom furniture had to be let go on the grounds that he didn’t exist.

So far, all this is just U.N. business as usual — venal and wasteful, albeit on a larger scale than ever before. But even by their own revolting standards, the U.N. crossed a line.

A program created to allow the world to constrain Saddam became instead the means by which Saddam constrained the world. Oilfor-Food gave him a free hand to reward wellconnected French and Russian suppliers.

He ran the show by selling cut-price vouchers for Iraqi oil to politicians and bureaucrats, which they could then offload on the world markets at the going rate.

Among the alleged beneficiaries were a French interior minister,a French U.N.ambassador, Russia’s “office of the president,” the Indonesian president,and the Reverend Jean-Marie Benjamin, the French priest who arranged Tariq Aziz’s disgusting photo-op with the Pope and in return for his efforts is said to have received vouchers for 4.5 million barrels of oil.

According to documents found in the oil ministry in Baghdad,Saddam saw to it that the man Mr. Annan picked to run Oil-for-Food, the U.N. undersecretary-general, Benon Sevan, got enough oil to make himself a nice illegal profit of $3.5 million.

In other words, “Oil-for-Fraud” is everything the left said the war was: It was all about oil — for Mr. Sevan, the U.N.,France, Russia, and the others who had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power.

Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny, but Saddam can use Mr.Annan’s office as a front for a multibillion-dollar global kickback scheme, and, until it was brought to public attention by the tireless Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal and a few other persistent types, the secretary-general apparently never noticed a thing.

He hadn’t even noticed that two of the firms enriched by his program had ties to financier Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, named by the U.N. as an individual “belonging to or associated with”Al Qaeda — just another of those non-existent links between Saddam and Islamist terrorism.

Mr. Sevan has now returned to New York from Australia, where he was lying low for several weeks. Not that he needed to go to a lot of trouble about it.The lethargic Aussie press made little effort to run him to ground.

It seems the notion that lifelong U.N. bureaucrats are at the center of a web of massive fraud, influence-peddling, veto-securing, and torture-funding at the expense of starving Iraqi urchins is just too, too “unthinkable” for much of the press.

So the conventional wisdom stays conventional — that we need to get the U.N.back into Iraq. No we don’t. Iraq deserves better than an organization that spent the last six years as Saddam’s collaborator.

As Ms. Rosett put it,“We are left to contemplate a U.N. system that has engendered a secretary-general either so dishonest that he should be dismissed or so incompetent that he is truly dangerous — and should be dismissed.”

He should be, but he almost certainly won’t be. After all, it’s hardly his fault. When he set up the show, who would have thought that one day there’d be American auditors in Baghdad? Why, it was, as Ms. Toynbee would say, “unthinkable.”

Mr. Annan should not be in Turtle Bay, Mr. Brahimi should not be in Baghdad. The U.N. needs to fix itself before it can plausibly be entrusted to fix anywhere else. And, if it doesn’t want to fix itself, it should be abandoned by America, Britain, Australia, and others to die in irrelevance. It’s time to think the unthinkable.