You know that UN Food for Oil corruption thing that people keep going on about? Well, the serious accusations in it (rather than ‘Iraqi officials added a couple of % to contracts and pocketed the difference’, which is a necessary evil when providing humanitarian assistance to people living under a corrupt regime) are pretty much made up.
I wonder how this will play in the right-wing media? (no, I don’t really; I’m perfectly aware they’ll ignore it as overly reality-based…)
The Gulf between the fantastically rational Monde Diplomatique and the loonies that kept going on about "UNSCAM" is as wide as the planet…
And as Monbiot pointed out the other day the UN problems are nothing next to the waste and corruption of the occupation, and the people in fault are going to be punished, which will never happen in the US. But UNSCAM did its work as a nice denial accessory, and will now be forgotten.
Key quote:
Four days before Paul Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority: the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The Inspector General’s job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn’t. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.