Claudia Rosett, who’s written regularly about the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, looks in more detail at the trade in baby food, and concludes:
[W]hat we know already is that Mr. Annan, whose Secretariat turned a blind eye to Saddam’s food pricing scams, has never apologized for presiding over the biggest fraud in the history of relief. He has not used the word “illegal.” The closest he’s come has been to admit this past March, after much stonewalling, that there may have been quite a lot of “wrong-doing”–before turning over the whole mess over to a U.N. investigation that has since smothered all details with its own blanket of secrecy.
Mr. Annan is due to step down next year. If he wants to leave a legacy more auspicious than having presided over Oil-for-Fraud, he might want to devote his twilight time at the U.N. to mending a system in which a U.N. Secretary-General feels free to describe the overthrow of a murderous tyrant as “illegal,” but no one at the top seems particularly bothered to have presided over that tyrant’s theft of food from hungry children.
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