Conservatives are trying to turn this into a morality play about how the UN can do no right.
It's more complex. Much of the oversight of the program was delegated to member nations, and no nation had a greater oversight role than the United States.
Saddam illegally sold billions of dollars worth of oil to Jordan, Turkey and Egypt, and the United States essentially looked the other way, because these were American allies.
Oil smuggling also occurred at sea. The "Multinational Interception Force" created to intercept illegal smuggling was essentially the U.S. Navy with a few British ships thrown in.
Finally, I believe the United States had such a strong role on the committee that approved all contracts that it could block any one it wished.
This is worth reading, from The Nation:
The much-vaunted kickbacks on import contracts also turn out to be not quite as advertised. Saddam, the claim goes, inflated the price of import contracts by 5 to 10 percent, then received the difference in cash from the contractors. Thousands of contracts, stretching over years, were involved; how could the UN have been so incompetent as not to notice? In fact, prices inflated by only 5 or 10 percent were difficult to detect precisely because the amounts were so small and often within the normal range of market prices. But when pricing irregularities were large enough that they might have indicated kickbacks, the UN staff did notice. On more than seventy occasions, the staff brought these to the attention of the 661 Committee, the Security Council body charged with implementing the sanctions. On no occasion did the United States block or delay the contracts to prevent the kickbacks from occurring. Although the United States, citing security concerns, blocked billions of dollars of humanitarian contracts--$5 billion were on hold as of July 2002--it never took action to stop kickbacks, even when they were obvious and well documented.
<a href='http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041206&s=gordon' target='_blank'>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041206&s=gordon</a>
The fact is, conservatives are pushing this scandal hard because they don't like the UN. They don't like they fact Kofi Annan has made it clear that the United States invasion of Iraq violated the UN charter, which we helped draft.
The UN's very existence is inconvenient to Republicans on a number of levels -- such as the [sarcasm]outlandishly socialist idea[/sarcasm] that the United States -- where people earn $37,610 per capita -- should pay a bit more to support the UN than Bangladesh, where people earn $400 per capita.
So conservatives are hyping this hard.
Don't believe the hype.
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