By Chuck Quilty

“Few of us,” wrote the playwright, Arthur Miller, “can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”

The United States is attempting to scapegoat the United Nations for alleged irregularities in the Oil-for-Food program which allowed Saddam Hussein to skirt the sanctions against Iraq and accumulate 1.74 billion in illicit funds according to Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group formed after the invasion to find Iraq’s WMD. The 1.74 billion figure cited by Duelfer is considerably less than the 10.1 billion estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office of the 21 billion estimated in a Senate subcommittee report. The current accusations raised by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) against the U.N. are hypocritical and cynical beyond belief. They are a disgusting attempt to hide the Bush administration’s failed Iraq policy and the death and suffering it has caused.

The Oil-for-Food program was initiated in late 1996, ostensibly to meet the needs of the Iraqi people suffering for the effects of sanctions. In reality, it was never intended to alleviate the suffering but merely to keep it from getting worse as the public concern grew throughout the world. It was also, at least in part, an attempt by the United States and the United Nations to put a human face on an inherently inhumane and tragic policy.

That Iraq benefited from illegal oil sales is not in dispute. Many of the trade deals were negotiated well before the Oil-for-Food program began. The most blatant and lucrative oil sales were to Jordan, Turkey and Syria. Oil sales to Jordan were approved by the United Nations under a special protocol (Article 50 of the UN Charter) that allowed nations who suffered from disproportionate economic hardship because of an embargo on a neighboring country to have special consideration. According to Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies, the trade with Turkey had informal approval under the same protocol and was widely known by Security Council members. (Not to mention that Turkey is a NATO member and use of Incirlik Air Force Base was essential to the U.S./British flights over the northern no-fly zone in Iraq. It was apparently unproblematic that Turkey often bombed the Iraqi Kurds that we were “keeping safe” from Saddam Hussein. Evidently, killing Iraqi Kurds was never the problem, who was killing them was.) The U.S. tried to dissuade Syria from the illicit trade but failed.

The so-called 661 committee of the United Nations Security Council, on which the U.S. was represented, had responsibility to monitor all contracts awarded under the Oil-for-Food program. While the U.S. routinely held up contracts on essential humanitarian goods, medicines and infrastructure parts claiming they had “dual” use, not once did they hold up a contract involving pricing irregularities even when alerted by U.N. administrators. It is also interesting that an estimated 80 percent of the oil smuggled out of Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program ended up in the United States. American firms used overseas subsidiaries to do a lucrative business under the Oil-for-Food program. Then too, there is the problem of up to $20 billion in “mismanaged” Iraqi oil funds for reconstruction under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The U.N. independent investigator, Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is due to issue a first report in January. Any UN officials found complicit in illegal actions should certainly be held accountable. But in the meantime, let’s stick to what is known as fact.

The real scandal is 13 years of comprehensive international sanctions which took the lives of an estimated half-million children under the age of five; the war of attrition under the illegal guise of no-fly zones; the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation which had not threatened us in any way; and the unwanted and illegal occupation of that country which has only exacerbated its spiraling descent into violence and chaos. The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths since the invasion. This along with the lives of over a thousand U.S. service men and women in the prime of their youth and countless thousands more wounded in body or mind is indeed disturbing.

The dead and the living in Iraq demand that we tell their story truthfully and intelligently, despite the inconvenient political consequences and personal discomfort we feel. Our service men and women in Iraq demand the same. If we allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency and denial over what our government has done in our names to further their imperial fantasies, we do so at the cost of our humanity and decency.

Chuck Quilty is a peace activist who lives in Rock Island.

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