"So should the U.N. be given control over Iraq's transition to a free and democratic nation, as John Kerry has demanded and President Bush is being politically pressured to do?" asks Pete du Pont rhetorically in today's OpinionJournal:
The United Nations' administration of the Oil-for-Food program was so ineffective, inadequate and corrupt that, in the words of OpinionJournal columnist Claudia Rosett, the U.N. "is an institution that should never be trusted to carry out missions requiring integrity or responsibility."
Why would the U.N. delegate total, unsupervised authority to run the program to Saddam? Perhaps because Iraq and the other nations whose companies were participating in the scam didn't want appropriate procedures and controls applied to their ventures . . . All of which may explain why France and Russia so vigorously opposed the liberation of Iraq a year ago: They didn't want their very lucrative and very illegal kickback scheme to come to an end.
But there is reason for optimism:
The House International Relations Committee is scheduled to hold hearings on all these matters. Chairman Henry Hyde feels much more strongly about U.N. corruption than his Senate colleagues do: he believes the Oil-for-Food program "represents a scandal without precedent in U.N. history," and so Mr. Annan's response "must be equally unprecedented."
Since the House appropriates the money that the U.S. contributes to the U.N. -- about a quarter of its annual $1.5 billion base budget -- Mr. Hyde might place the next quarterly U.N. check on his desk, to be exchanged for a full and accurate report on Oil-for-Food from Kofi Annan.
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