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Skeptic Ian Williams questions an earlier president.

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by Ian Williams

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MaximsNews.com Weekly Column

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations

by Ian Williams 

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com [See his Bio.  See his columns listed below. Ian Williams' email:  uswarreport@igc.org ]

          UNITED NATIONS -- 23 June 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /  Since Louis Pasteur discovered rabies vaccine over a century ago, there is really very little excuse for William Safire.

One can appreciate The New York Times wanting to run a reservation for rabid reactionaries as a public service – a  form of “care in the community” – but after Jayson Blair’s in-absentia descriptions of Jessica Lynch’s bucolic homestead and Judith Miller’s equally imaginative pen portraits of absent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you really would expect the newspaper to ringfence Safire with a chain of rigorous fact checkers.

Safire’s column on 15 June would have made Kofi Annan a tremendous amount of money if he were to sue the former amanuensis for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew under British libel laws.

Let us begin with his first sentence, where he claims that he “had zapped the United Nations for its cover-up of the costliest financial rip-off in history - even calling it "Kofigate.” And so he had -- called it Kofigate that is.

It takes some chutzpah for the great philologist to forget the etymological origins of his neologism, which was not just Watergate, which happened on his watch as Tricky Dicky’s speechwriter but also Iran Contragate, the Reagan era arms smuggling scandal that had so many of his conservative colleagues convicted as felons. But then, remembering that he began as flack for Spiro Agnew, you could perhaps deduce a severe case of tunnel vision.

Since Safire obviously believes that size matters, let’s look at financial size. U.S. taxpayers are still paying the trillions of dollars run up the Savings and Loans scandal that his hero Ronald Reagan made possible, and that so many people connected to the current ruling family benefited from substantially.

But then he also has to overlook the deregulation enabled Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, which cost U.S. shareholders and pensioners more than the entire value of the U.N. Oil for Food programme from beginning to end. 

He has to overlook the $8 billion Pentagon uncontested contract to Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company. 

Did any of these genuine multi-billion rip-offs by his chums feature in the Safire column? 

Don’t hold your breath.

Safire’s investigative zeal stopped short of “zapping” his own protégée Ahmed Chalabi for his twenty-two year sentence in Jordan for bank fraud that cost the Jordanian Central Bank several hundred million dollars according to an Arthur Anderson report.

That is sad, since the origin of this storm in an oil can is indeed the former CIA pensioner and convicted bank fraud, who had realized that the involvement of the U.N. and Lakhdar Brahimi would sideline him in the new Iraqi administration.

So Chalabi began his campaign with an allegation that lots of people took kickbacks from Saddam – which is almost certainly true, but he also alleged that one of them was the head of the Oil For Food programme. 

Since there were several hundred names on the list, one U.N. official made it, at worst, a half of a percent of a U.N. Scandal.

Chalabi’s allies in the U.S. used that half percent connection to pile every success that Saddam had in circumventing the sanctions on the doorstep of the U.N. at Turtle Bay.

In fact, Chalabi’s lawyer in London is now claiming that a hacker attack ate his homework – which happened to contain the only, if insubstantial, serious evidence of U.N. wrongdoing about the Oil For Food programme, since no one else was allowed access to it to check whether it was, for example typed by the same office that did the famous Niger uranium contracts.

But once Safire had the scent, he was not to thwarted so easily. 

Let us begin by admitting that there is indeed a genuine Oil For Food Scandal. Indeed there are several. 

However, it was not a U.N. scandal unless you perform the forensic somersault of blaming the U.N. for all actions by its member states, including decisions made at U.S. insistence in the Security Council. 

Needless to say, the intellectually hyperactive Safire does just that.

Of the $10.1 billion allegedly siphoned off by Saddam, $5.7 billion was from smuggling oil to neighboring countries, such as US allies Jordan and Turkey. 

The U.S. made no effort to limit, let alone stop this traffic.

Indeed, Chalabi’s Kurdish allies made lots of money out of the trade. 

The other $4.4 billion was the result of kickbacks from imports and surcharges on oil contracts.

These stories were broken by genuine investigative reporters at the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, who were, shall we say, less imaginative than the Journal’s editorial writers in passing the blame on to the U.N.

That is left to fact-light columnists in the Journal – and Safire.

In fact, the Security Council, on which the US has a veto that it has not generally been slow to use, had allowed the Iraqis to negotiate their own contracts, and independent experts – from for example the British Customs service - scrutinized them for signs of surcharging.

The U.S. was represented on the U.N. Sanctions committee, which pored over each contract, but its members never noticed the skimming until the Oil for Food office itself eventually alerted them to the problem.

So what is left? 

Annan’s son worked for a inspection company – but left before they got the contract. Excuse me. 

As a conflict of interest that comes in way below Cheney and Halliburton. Cheney is still getting income from Halliburton.

In fact, if you want a real scandal it was the American and British insistence on maintaining broad economic sanctions when it was clear that their only effect was to strengthen the regime and its supporters by destroying all independent sectors of the economy.

In the end, London and then Washington realized that if they wanted to maintain sanctions they had to ensure that the ordinary Iraqis were fed, so the Oil For Food programme was born – and could be blamed for ensuring that most of the population was entirely dependent on the Baathist state machinery for survival. 

But they were fed, which wasn’t happening under the previous American-inspired sanctions regime.

Their actions have made it certain that the Security Council will never again use such broad sanctions again.

Once again, it’s a scandal – but it is not a U.N. scandal.

In the end, the U.N. involvement is reduced to the list found in Baghdad of people who allegedly received "oil vouchers" from the Baathist regime.

But since there is no fire, let’s concentrate on whipping up some smoke. 

Safire claims that the U.N. is hiding documents from Henry Hyde, the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee. 

Hyde and Safire probably party together baying in unison under the full moon. 

Hyde is on record as wanting the U.S. to quit the U.N, and has all the authority of the Fijian Council of chiefs to demand U.N. documents. 

It may be hard for Hyde to understand, but the U.N. has other members too.

The International Advisory and Monitoring Board for the Iraqi Development Fund is still waiting to hear how U.S. spent the $7.6 billion it snaffled from the OFF surpluses and that is legal, since the U.S. voted for the resolution setting up the Board. 

Not a bark from the rabid Safire.

  In fact, on Tuesday this week, the auditors’s report was leaked to the Financial Times, complaining about lack of CPA cooperation in the seeming Post Conquest rip-offs of Iraq’s oil money. 

Would you like to take a bet that Safire will not waste a column inch on “Bremergate?”

Actually, now that Volcker is beginning the U.N. investigation, with his blessing, the U.N. has agreed that the Banc Paribas can release its documents on a subpoena if anyone in the U.S. gets round to. 

But like Senator Joe MacCarthy’s list of hundreds of communist agents in the State Department it is much easier to refer to hundreds of boxes of files, unopened, as if they each and all contain killer evidence. 

Personally I think they are pandering.

But then Safire also alleges that Volcker is being underfunded. 

Actually the U.N. has put in $4million for the inquiry – which is coming from the U.N. budget that Safire and his friends have spent twenty years squeezing.

Chalabi was quite right to think that Brahimi shared the mistrust of most Iraqis for him, but now that he has been excluded from the Interim government you would think that the campaign would lay off. 

But no, they carry on barking, and none so frothedly as William Safire. 

Maybe the allegations that Chalabi passed on secrets to the Iranians reminds Safire of his ties to an administration that was selling weapons to the Ayatollahs and thus kindles some kind of empathy?

So where will it all go? 

Volcker may well find some inefficiencies, such we find in any organization, not least the Federal government or  The New York Times. 

They may find evidence that one or more U.N. staff took kickbacks, although one has to doubt it, since what would the Iraqis gain from bribing U.N. officials?

The whole affair is an assault on the United Nations, that was originally intended to boost Chalabi’s ephemeral political career, but now has a pathological momentum of its own. 

It could be intended to preempt any move to give Annan a third term as Secretary General, in which case, in an oblique way, they are probably doing him a favor.

But in the hands of Safire and Hyde, we should not, perhaps, overemphasize rationality as a factor.

          Ian Williams' email:  uswarreport@igc.org

 Just Released: 

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past  

by Ian Williams

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations  23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546  16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World?  9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC  2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot  12 May 2004

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