U.N. forgivable

I don't normally reprint entire articles/editorials, but this one is in my opinion perfectly to the point, and i don't think i could add anything to make it any better. From IBD today.....................
U.N.-Forgivable
Posted 10/27/2005
United Nations: The final report on the oil-for-food scandal has been released, to little fanfare. How sad so few people, apart from policy wonks, will read it. It's a stunning indictment of the U.N.'s current leadership.
Maybe it's just an accident that the U.N.'s report on the biggest financial scandal in history was released amid the political maelstrom of the Harriet Miers fiasco and the possible indictment of two key presidential aides, thus ensuring it would get little coverage. But we doubt it.
The first news accounts of the so-called Volcker Commission's final report emphasized that 2,200 out of 4,500 companies that were involved in the U.N.'s $67 billion oil-for-food program — set up to let Saddam Hussein sell oil to buy food, medicine and other necessities for the Iraqi people — had paid bribes.
It's true. Those companies — among them, Daimler-Chrysler, Volvo, Glaxo-SmithKline and Novartis — paid bribes. And those bribes let Saddam steal $11 billion from the program.
But who, we wonder, looked the other way as bribes were paid? Who served as middlemen? And who, besides Saddam, profited?
The answer is uncomfortable for the U.N. and its many defenders. Saddam had paid off hundreds of officials around the world, like pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, former French government official and Chirac ally Charles Pasqua, France's envoy to the U.N. Jean-Bernard Merrimee and Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
But it was the U.N. itself, as venal as any mob-run enterprise, that made the corruption of its own program possible — "facilitated it," in U.N.-speak.
The Volcker report, while highlighting corporate malfeasance, also shows conclusively that the U.N. crooks who ran oil for food gave preference to French, Russian and Chinese companies.
Why? The easiest answer is they were the most corruptible. But they're also all members of the U.N. Security Council and thus had enormous clout in deciding what the U.N. would do.
Which explains why all three countries were big advocates of ending the U.N.'s 1990s-era sanctions against Saddam's evil regime. They hoped, as cheaters do, to prosper in a post-sanction Iraq from Saddam's gratitude for their help.
What is most disturbing is the complicity of the United Nations itself. Indeed, the organization's misconduct would fill a small library. To wit:
The man handpicked by General-Secretary Kofi Annan to head the program, Benon Sevan, took bribes; Annan's son, Kojo, was awarded a high-level job with Cotecna, the company that won the U.N. contract to administer the program; and U.N. bureaucrats, directed by Annan's chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, shredded documents that might incriminate the global agency as the investigation got under way. The litany of misconduct goes on and on.
It's clear that, at the bare minimum, Annan's tenure as the U.N.'s top official is no longer tenable. He must resign — or be fired. It's also clear that the U.N. is so rife with corruption and dishonesty it can no longer serve its intended purpose.
To say the U.N. needs "reform" is useless. At this point, it might be better to end the U.N.'s mandate and start completely anew.
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