Three countries blocked all efforts to stop the corruption

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The latest Volcker report says that the UN can't conduct massive multi-million dollar programs such as the UN Oil-For-Food program because from the Security Council on down, the agency is rife with corruption. While the UN does do some good things and ostensibly it is a good place for countries to work out grievances without having to start wars (as conducted by their militaries, as opposed to using terrorists as a proxy), it is plain to see that the UN has fallen far from it's intended purpose. These days it acts as a collective lobbying effort to humiliate both Israel and the United States. What's more, it gives a forum for countries that are not strong enough to economically and militarily challenge the US, like France, undeserved equality. China and Russia are a slightly different story.

I've said many times that I thought going into Iraq was strategically the right thing to do if we wanted to put ample pressure on the Iranian mullahs. What this latest installment of the Volcker report clearly shows is that there was no will on the part of the UN Security Council to contain Hussein's Iraq and most likely, as evidenced by the below article, the UNSC was on it's way to lifting the sanctions from Iraq entirely.

Did his regime have WMD's? All reports currently say no but some, like Curt Weldon and Yosseff Bodansky, believe that some WMD were moved to Syria well before the war started and then recently moved to Lebanon. I have no idea if that is true but if it were, then lifting the sanctions would have proved the UN more impotent in dealing with rogue regimes. Even if you believe that no matter what was going on Iraq, we should have never invaded, which is valid, because of rampant abuse and corruption the UN didn't give any viable alternatives. They essentially offered the advice, "Don't invade Iraq, it'll cost us too much dough!" That's not exactly a good reason to let a dictator who financially supports Palestinian terrorists against Israel, stay in power, WMD's or not.

The Oil-For-Food program has already been proven to be a farce. It was a Trojan horse for the purposes of eventually removing sanctions and allowing a despotic overtly anti-Israeli regime to stay in place. Granted I one could say that about almost all of the Middle Eastern countries but they are not all one in the same and do deserve to be treated differently depending on a variety of factors.

For those of you out there in the US and world who feel that American hegemony is worse than international terrorism and look to the UN to be the flashpoint for counter-balance, you have to ask yourself a hard question. How important is containing US "cowboy" actions across the world to you if you won't do even the minimum to cut back corruption in your own institutions? Speaking from the hawk-conservative point of view, why should any of us take you seriously about any matter of international importance when it's coming from a place of rampant corruption and cynicism? No country can honestly take the UN seriously so long as it continues to act like corrupted labor union or mob family. To take the UN seriously would be like seeking clinical therapy from a paranoid schizophrenic.

Here's the story:

Russia, China and France sabotaged UN Security Council efforts to crack down on Saddam Hussein's manipulation of the oil-for-food programme, the Volcker report says.

They worked effectively to assist the Iraq dictatorship, which, according to numerous Iraqi witnesses, had decided to give contract preferences to "companies from countries perceived as sympathetic to the lifting of [UN] sanctions, most prominently some members of the Security Council."

Speaking yesterday, Mr Volcker said there "was no doubt that there were difficulties with the Security Council, hampering action on some reports of smuggling and kickbacks".

The report names China, Russia and France as the main obstacles to a more effective system. Britain and the US repeatedly proposed changes, only to be blocked by the pro-Iraqi trio. The report says there was no sustained effort by the Security Council to tackle claims of corruption or the milking of the programme by Saddam.

It also reveals how Russian companies, by far the biggest beneficiaries of Iraq oil contracts, took huge packages of cash to Iraq's Moscow embassy by way of kickbacks.

In one 18-month period alone, Russian businessmen handed the Iraqis $52 million.