The Coalition of the Shady and Corrupt
Evidence of widespread corruption within the UN Iraq Oil For Food Program can be found here, in a summary of what was found in the ISG report as it related to Iraq’s dealings with other countries during the time period he was supposed to be under UN sanctions. France, Russia, and China are all implicated. Here are some alarming snippets:
Detail from the full Iraq Survey Group report – compiled from scores of former Iraqi officials and captured intelligence documents – shows that Saddam was intending to resume his WMD programme as soon as UN sanctions were dropped.
His officials believed they could make WMD within two years – but the only flaw in their strategy was to think that Tony Blair and President George Bush would not invade Iraq without explicit UN permission.
Extraordinary detail from the report was reverberating around the world yesterday as the French government issued an angry denial that its ministers had privately assured Saddam they would use their UN veto to stop war in return for oil contracts.
The full text of the report shows that Saddam realised in 1995, after his son-in-law defected to Jordan, that he had no choice but to comply with UN weapons inspectors. He ordered the destruction of all documents – but told scientists to “preserve plans in their minds” and “keep the brains of Iraq’s scientists fresh”.
His strategy was to use Iraq’s vast oil reserves as a lever to pull apart the international community, by bribing Russian and French officials. The report shows this policy carried out to a breathtaking degree.
PLEASE make sure you read the whole thing.
This story needs to get major play in the American press. For so long it has been portrayed by the mediots that the countries who opposed us in the Iraq war did so on principle because they didn’t think it was legal and right to invade what they called a “sovereign” nation. This report from the ISG shows that these countries were anything but principled and were looking only to keep their greedy pockets lined while the Iraq people suffered and while Saddam was holding out for the chance to strike up his WMD plans again.
It also backs up Bush’s policy of pre-emption. We don’t know what happened to the WMD, but Saddam and Co. had every intention of whipping up some more just as soon as they got the chance. George W. Bush was right to act BEFORE Iraq became an imminent threat via selling weapons to terrorists. Of course, if you listen to some, it wasn’t worth it, it was the wrong war at the wrong place, etc. Apparently what some of these people who think that way believe is that rogue nations are going to follow the letter of international law. We can’t wait until someone HAS weapons before we act. Otherwise we’ll just be in the situation we’re in now with North Korea. Saddam Hussein clearly was relying on sanctions to be lifted at some point in time so he could resume business as usual.
And we all know what “business as usual” was to him. Thankfully, he’s sitting in jail right now and won’t be a problem anymore.
More analysis of this report can be found here.
More: NRO weighs in.