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MaximsNews
Columnist
Ian
Williams
Ian
Williams
is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent
for The Nation and a weekly
columnist for www.MaximsNews.com.
Ian Williams is the past
president of the United Nations
Correspondents Association. See
his Bio.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
The
Truth Hurts!
UNITED
NATIONS -- 20 April 2005 / www.MaximsNews.com
/ The
truth hurts – but you do not need to
be a Sado-Masochist to wish there were
more of it about.
For two years the United Nations has
been under scurrilous ill founded
attack by a bunch of conservative
zealots, who, in the face of tepid
responses from the organization have
stampeded even the more rational media
to give page space for their
accusations.
Last
Thursday, Kofi Annan told the truth.
In
a roundtable for former UN
spokespeople, the UN Secretary General
said that the bulk of the billions of
dollars that Saddam Hussein made from
Iraqi oil sales to Jordan and Turkey
– for which the Secretary General
and the United Nations have been
getting it in the neck in the Murdoch
media and the US Congress – was
garnered with the full knowledge and
acquiescence – of the British and
Americans who, "decided to close
their eyes to smuggling to Turkey and
Jordan because they were allies."
Annan
also mentioned that the final Volcker
Report on the Oil For Food program
"should also reveal that at the end
of the programme, we gave eight to
nine billion dollars to the CPA, the
Coalition which has not been accounted
for."
His
statement, which should come as no
surprise to MaximsNews
subscribers, since I and
others have pointed this out from the
beginning, caused outraged replies
from the British and Americans.
The
truth hurts apparently, which is
perhaps why
London
and Washington
have been so sparing in their
application of it.
Funnily
enough, Annan was apparently not aware
that his comments were being
broadcast, and so ascended into
undiplomatic candour on the issue.
Indeed
in the same exchange, he referred to
the previous occasion when a BBC
reporter had badgered him into
admitting that "not in conformity
with the UN Charter" actually meant
"illegal."
However,
being unintended does not make it a
mistake.
What
the Secretary General said is
unassailably true, and he really
should have been shouting it from the
beginning.
Economy
with the truth is not always bad.
For
example, telling people that they are
ugly can be socially
counterproductive, but Annan reminding two
of his most demanding member states
that they should admit their own
actions rather let him take the rap is
an entirely reasonable form of
speaking truth to powers.
So
why, since what Annan said was
demonstrably true, why did the
Americans and British unite in their
determination to snipe at him for
telling the truth?
Because
for them, Annan's job is to dangle
without demurral in the wind and
suffer the attacks of the conservative
lynch mobs – which British Foreign
secretary Jack Straw rather
disgracefully joined by implication,
doubtless impelled by the impending
British election.
In
fact, the Anglo-American allies did
not really
turn a blind eye to this traffic.
They
watched it, recorded it, and only
contrived to get indignant a decade
after it began when Damascus
got in on the act after
Syria's Bashir Al-Assad did his
outstanding impression of a rat
jumping on a sinking ship and made up
with Saddam just before the end.
For
over a decade and half the allies,
(who, showing that perfidy is not an
exclusively Anglophone thing, in those
far off days included
France
), refused their obligations under
article 50 of the UN Charter to help
countries that suffered economically
from maintaining UN sanctions against
Iraq.
So they simply decided to let the
Jordanians and the Turks buy the oil
from Iraq.
However, the uninhibited economy with
the truth displayed by the
US
and
UK
is absolutely indefensible.
Last
Friday Straw declared in response that
"I regret to say that
suggestions that the
United Kingdom
ignored smuggling of oil from
Iraq
to
Jordan
and
Turkey
are inaccurate."
The Foreign
Secretary's shock at the accusation
would easily qualify him to head the
gendarmerie in any Casablanca
casino.
He
went to say that "The corruption of
the Oil for Food Programme to generate
illicit revenue and the smuggling of
food to and from
Iraq
are among the practices now being
investigated by Paul Volcker's
Independent Inquiry Committee."
He
really should get better briefings
from his staff.
Volcker has announced
that the final report will deal
precisely with the role of member
governments on the Sanction Committee.
This
ambiguity is reflected in Straw's
statement which puzzlingly claims
"in May 2001 the
UK
proposed measures through a draft UN
Security Council resolution seeking to
clamp down on smuggling through
providing lawful supplies of Iraqi oil
to
Jordan
and
Turkey, but this resolution was opposed."
Either
it was "smuggling," or it was
"lawful trading" and any customs
officer confronted with a suitcase of
Rolexes at
London's Heathrow Airport
may be able to enlighten the foreign
secretary about the difference.
And
the resolution was ten years too late.
Better briefed, Richard Grenell, US
spokesman at the UN, distinguished
between "oil smuggling, which was
happening without our knowledge, and
the very public waiver which was
granted to some countries."
Of
course this was true.
But why did the
US
choose to make this avowal in the face
of the Secretary General telling the
truth, but stay silent for the last
two years in which the rabid rights
have slanderously laid these "Smuggled" billions worth of oil
at Annan's door?
Interestingly,
neither British nor American spokesmen
responded to the accusation about the
mis-spending of the eight billion plus
that the Oil for Food program handed
over to the Coalition Provisional
Authority.
That is an irrefutable fact
to which they would much rather not
let their feigned indignation give
extra publicity.
The very way that the
US
smuggled out the report
saying just that to Congress on the
day of the Iraqi election rather
suggests they do not want to see too
much attention given to it.
As
Robin Cook, Straw's predecessor said
recently in the Guardian,
"There is a breathtaking hypocrisy
to the indictment of Kofi Annan over
the oil-for food programme for Iraq.
"It was the
US
and the UK
who devised the programme, piloted the
UN resolutions that gave it authority,
sat on the committee to administer it
and ran the blockade to enforce it.
"I
know because I spent a high proportion
of my time at the Foreign Office
trying to make a success of it."
If
the Volcker Report lives up to its
promise to examine the actions of
governments in its final report this
summer, we can expect to see it tarred
as a UN-financed propaganda smear
against the United States, not least
since it will cover the
administrations of both Bush and
Clinton.
We cannot reasonably expect
the lynch mob currently after the UN
and Annan to divert their
attentions to the successive
administrations in London
and Washington who will be named.
But
as Annan himself admitted in his talk
to the spokespersons, the Secretariat
is also guilty, of repeatedly turning
the other cheek in the face of
unprincipled political and
journalistic assaults.
It has
attempted to deal with a rabid pack of
unilateralists by giving them bones,
instead of hitting them over their
muzzles and inoculating the rest of
the media with a strong dose of
preemptive truth telling.
If
the UN Secretariat had jumped on this
from beginning instead of implicitly
accepting its role as scapegoat for
the sins of its member governments, it
may have lent a sense of proportion to
the so called scandal.
Even
now, UN officials are very reticent to
point out that a program that doubled
the nutritional intake of Iraqis in
the face of Ba'athist indifference
and Western sanctions, and which
starved Saddam Hussein of the
resources to build weapons of mass
destruction, is by most international
standards, an outstanding success.
The
fact that the
US
asked the program to continue for a
year after the invasion suggests that
even in
Washington
more rational souls accepted that.
Annan
has two years to get his reform
proposals through. He will have to be
tougher with his enemies if he is to
succeed.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
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