Food for fraud

Of the many appalling aspects of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, one of the most unforgivable was the pain and death he inflicted on Iraq’s children. And even more shocking is that the program that was meant to help them, the U.N. Oil for Food program, turned out to have been disgracefully corrupt, a caricature of a foreign-aid program.

During the 1990s, it was always the U.S. government that took the blame, even though it was Saddam who should have. The purported reason was that we refused to let up on the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, which were imposed because Saddam failed to open up his weapons of mass destruction programs to international inspections and demonstrably disarm — as he had agreed in the Gulf War ceasefire resolution.

Forinstance,a UNICEF report from 1997, stated, “32 percentofChildren under the age of five — a total of 960,000 — are undernourished.” By some reports, 5,000 Iraqi children died every month due to sanctions. More than 1 million Iraqis were said to have died from disease and malnutrition during the 1990s.

Now, it was this suffering that the U.N. Oil for Food program was meant to assuage when the program came on line in 1995, but it did not. Since the fall of Saddam and the end of the Oil for Food program on Nov. 21, the staggering failings of the program, now better known as the Oil for Palaces program, have been revealed.

Writes Claudia Rosett in Commentary magazine, “Suddenly, Oil-for-Food is with us again, this time splashed all over the news as the subject of scandal at the U.N.: bribes, kickbacks, fraud, smuggling, stories of graft involving tens of billions of dollars and countless barrels of oil, and implicating big business and high officials in dozens of countries; allegations that the head of the program himself was on the take.”

Today on Capitol Hill, Rep. Christopher Shays, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, will convene a hearing to examine the Iraqi Oil for Food program. Anyone interested in how not to run a foreign-aid program should be there at 10 a.m. in Room 210 of the House Cannon office building. This is the second congressional hearing. The Iraqi Governing Council has started its own investigation, and even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has finally agreed to an independent investigation, as well.

Some details of what is already known, which can be found in a new paper by Nile Gardiner and James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, “Investigate the United Nations Oil-for Food Fraud”:

• Between 1997 and 2002, Oil for Food generated $67 billion in revenues for the Iraqi regime. There was little or no oversight from the United Nations of how this money was spent.

• In addition, Saddam is estimated to have generated $10.1 billion in illegal revenues by exploiting the Oil for Food program, through smuggling through Syria and through illicit surcharges on oil contracts.

• Saddam used Oil for Food to stay in power through a global network of companies, politicians and other individuals who benefited from the program. The list reaches into Western governments, into the United Nations itself and includes 46 Russian and 11 French names.

• Between 1996 and 2003, Russian companies received $7.3 billion in business through Oil for Food; French firms earned $3.7 billion.

• The United Nations itself had a vested interest in the program, overseeing a flow of funds averaging at least $15 billion a year. It was administered by 10 U.N. agencies, employing over 1,000 staff, and the United Nations collected 2.2 percent commission on every barrel of oil.

There are a couple of lessons in this.

One is that these revelations do not inspire confidence that the United Nations is capable of running anything in Iraq — exactly at the moment when the Bush administration is hanging its hopes for a June 30 transition in Iraq on U.N. guidance. Any role for the United Nations must be limited.

Second, it is critical to remember that Iraqi children are so much better off today than they used to be under Saddam’s dictatorship and his corrupt dealings with the United Nations. Despite all the attacks on Bush administration policy, we are giving Iraqis a future. Through USAID, 3 million Iraqi children have been vaccinated. Almost a quarter-million children and pregnant women have been given high-protein foods. More than 2,500 schools have been renovated, and 2.5 million children have been given school kits, and on and on.

If 5,000 Iraqi children were dying every month under Saddam, and we have now been in Iraq one year, it means that 60,000 children have been saved. That’s a number worth remembering.

Helle Dale is director of Foreign Policy and Defense Studies at the Heritage Foundation. E-mail: helle.dale@heritage.org.