The United Nations, Moral Equivalency, and the Oil-for-Food Scandal

First off let me put all my cards on the table. I'm not a fan of the United Nations. I, and most conservatives in America, believe the international organization is biased against Israel, is run by incompetents, is a inefficient bureaucracy, and is anti-American at its core. I believe that the people that run the U.N. are more interested in talking about helping the world than actually working to make the world better. To support my contention I present two very troubling examples of how the United Nations is counterproductive in the on-going effort to improve the lives of people around the globe.

The United Nations is great at moral equivalency, and a prime example of this is the United Nation's Council on Human Rights. Here is the mission statement of the Council taken off of the UN's website; The.. "Commission on Human Rights procedures and mechanisms are mandated to examine, monitor and publicly report either on human rights situations in specific countries or territories." In other words it is supposed to examine and report on human rights abuses from around the globe. However, a quick look at the members of the Council is extremely revealing. In 2004 Communist China, where political dissidents are routinely jailed without a trail, Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is outlawed, and Zimbabwe, where blacks murder land-owning whites at the behest of the its dictator and whose government uses food as a political weapon, were all members. Even more astonishing is that in 2003 Libya, run by the dictator Momar Kadafi, chaired the Council. Do you think the Council actually helped to spread human rights around the world with these members? This is just one example of how the U.N. is good at talking a good game, but when it comes down to actually pressuring countries to respect human rights it would rather give that country a seat on the Council of Human Rights than bother with actually making a real difference. (See this for more)

All this makes the recent revelations about the oil-for-food scandal unsurprising. Nonetheless, it is important to understand what happened in order to show that the U.N. is a corrupt organization that eagerly helped a brutal dictator in order to turn a profit; all at the expense of the Iraqi people. Now since the oil-for-food scandal is a little tricky to understand I'm going to try to touch the high points in a few sentences. However, keep in mind that this was a complex scheme involving many layers of bureaucracy and a massive attempt to conceal what was really going on.

After the 1991 Gulf War a program was conceived to allow Iraq's vast oil wealth help improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis. In essence, the Saddam Hussein's Iraq would sell oil on the open market and that money would be put directly into a fund. Money from that fund would then be used to buy food, clothing, and medicine for the Iraqi people. In theory this was a great idea to help alleviate the suffering of Iraq. America, which came up with the idea in the first place (of course), wanted to administer the program but the international community led by left-wing politicians in Western Europe insisted that the United Nations should control the operation since it would be viewed as having more "international authority." The program was then instituted and Saddam, while under United Nations sanctions, was allowed to sell a portion of his oil for food and medicine for the Iraqi people as a humanitarian gesture.

Instead, Hussein gave out vouchers as kickbacks to businessmen and government officials across the Middle East and Europe, including members of the Russian Parliament and a former Interior Minister of France. Saddam's dictatorship was able to siphon off an estimated $10 to $20 billion from the program through oil smuggling and systematic thievery, by demanding illegal payments from companies buying Iraqi oil, and through kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq--all under the noses of U.N. bureaucrats. What is even more troubling is that many high ranking U.N. officials, including the Secretary General Kofi Annan, are suspected of personally profiting from the scam. For a more in depth explanation see this. For other background information and opinions on the oil-for-food scandal I recommend these articles:

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosett200404182336.asp

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/459pqvob.asp

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004801

This oil-for-food episode further supports the contention of conservatives like myself that the United Nations is does not hold the moral high ground when it comes to determining the fate of the human race. In essence, the U.N. is an organization out to enrich itself at the expense of others, while claiming it knows what is best for the world. The United States has been by far the largest financial contributor to the U.N. even since its creation in 1945, and as Americans we need to rethink our support of an organization that is not effective and even works to undermine American influence and power worldwide. We need to also keep in mind the membership of the Council on Human Rights and the oil-for-food scandal the next time the United Nations portrays itself as the moral arbiter of the world.

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~ The Conservative Guy