UNacceptable

The U.N. was in charge of supervising the sale of Iraqi oil and the Iraqi regime's purchase of food and medicines with the proceeds. The program was designed to alleviate the humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the international sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War. Some $10.1 billion dollars was diverted possible in part because of a UN policy that set the prices for the oil shipments before they were delivered -- a policy vulnerable to corruption. As the Guardian reports, the U.S. General Accounting Office found -- and presented its findings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- that:

"…the Iraqi government pocketed $5.7 billion by smuggling oil to its neighbors and $4.4 billion by extracting illicit surcharges and kickbacks on otherwise legitimate contracts."

It gets worse. As United Press International points out: "beyond the skimming itself, 87 percent of the contracts for delivering food were overpriced."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced this week that the U.N. will investigate the misappropriations, but some are rightly skeptical of the organization's ability to conduct an investigation that may implicate some of its high-ranking members in a kickback scandal.

In his testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, said that previous U.S. and British attempts to ensure the transparency of the oil for food program were resisted by France, Russia, and China. As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports:

"Negroponte said U.S. and British diplomats on the council finally succeeded in 2001 to initiate a retroactive pricing system in which oil would be exported first and the price set later, reducing the chance for corruption. The program ran from 1997 to the start of the war in Iraq one year ago.

The ambassador said Russia, France, and China may have been driven by commercial considerations to protect companies involved in oil deals. All three states also had abstained from the 1999 resolution revamping the sanctions regime against Hussein."

France, Russia, and China must explain why they resisted changes that would have made the program more transparent. Protection of their "commercial interests," as Negroponte suggests, may have been indeed a motive for blocking reform. It is far from clear, though, that the U.S. and Britain made the passage of these changes -- and by extension the program's transparency -- a priority. This also raises the question of how U.S. and British companies profited from the misappropriations along with their French, Chinese, and Russian counterparts.

Jean-David Levitte, the French Ambassador to the U.S., argues in a commentary in the Los Angeles Times that the suggestion that French companies and banks were the main beneficiaries of the oil-for-food program -- and thus had the most to gain from looking the other way -- are false, and that the United States and Britain could have rejected any of the contracts that the UN considered if they suspected any financial improprieties. They did not. As Levitte writes in his "First 'Freedom Fries,' Now Oil-for-Food Lies: Give France a Break":

"The complete contracts were only circulated to the U.S. and Britain, which had expressly asked to see them and would have been in the best position to have known if anything improper was going on. Though a number of contracts were put on hold by the American and British delegations on security-related grounds, no contract was ever held up because malfeasance, such as illegal kickbacks, had been detected.

France was never a major destination for Iraqi oil during the program. In 2001, 8% of Iraqi oil was imported by France, compared with 44.5% imported by the U.S., which was the No. 1 importer all along."

During the Senate hearings, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden asked Negroponte to provide the Senate with a list of the U.S. companies that did business under the "oil for food" program. Negroponte said that he would return with that answer because there is no such list -- so much for promoting the virtues of transparency. As Biden said:

"The United States of America has all that information - release it… I see no rationale for it being classified, nothing in the law, nothing in terms of U.S. security."

Further investigations into the U.N.'s oil-for-food program are needed by the U.N. and in the countries whose companies were contracted by the program. In this regard, the U.S.'s Senate investigation has set a good precedent and should continue its work.

The U.N. should fire those implicated in any wrongdoing and take measures to insure that similar improprieties are not repeated. Whether the U.N. likes it or not, the way its investigation is conducted will reflect on the organization's transparency and integrity as a whole. But as is often forgotten in U.S. debates about the UN's role, the U.S. is a member of its Security Council and, as such, it bears more responsibility than most for whatever happens in that organization. This goes double for the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, because U.S. companies were the main beneficiaries of whatever improprieties that transpired.

Ambassador Levitte has a legitimate point when he criticizes the scapegoating of France, but that's not to say that France is entitled to a free pass in the oil-for-food scandal. No one on the UN Security Council -- the U.S. included -- should.