"Oil for Food" Insanity

[The Mad Monk]

Do you have any idea how much denial you've posted in the past four months alone? Everything is propaganda, assumptions, or overreaction to you.

Propaganda is the reason.

The UN is placed under an unremittingly harsh spotlight by the right-wing American media. Individual crimes and mistakes become a failure of the whole organisation.
Allegations of corruption become grotesquely embellished 'facts'. A tiny budget and limited powers becomes 'weakness' - despite these being the very qualities right-wing Americans seek in the federal government.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=3471347#post3471347

Is the UN being blamed for ALL of Saddam's smuggling operations again?

It certainly does... if there was evidence. Which there is a notable lack of at the moment.

edit, xpost.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=3435657#post3435657

How long would it take the US to start denouncing the new organisation as corrupt, impotent, bureaucratic and a threat to national sovereignty?

How many minutes?

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=3306762#post3306762

As for the Iraqis starving during the sanctions, that did not happen. The Oil for Food programme kept them fed, and was at the time accepted by the US as reasonably uncorrupt. It was also one of the largest operations the UN has ever undertaken, and was entirely financed by Iraq itself. Without it, the Iraqi people would have starved.

Now that it's no longer needed, it's been labelled as corrupt by the American right, as usual with no real evidence except frankly dodgy 'documents'. And the French are involved as well. How perfect. France and the UN in one piece of muckraking.

Note words and phrases like:

'alleged'
'accused'
'according to'
'claims'
'US Patriot Act'

The article says that the Patriot Act allows the US Treasury Department to name alleged money-launderers - in other words, they don't need any evidence.

Hey, nice Republican links.

There's so much nonsense in them that it's hard to know where to begin. Still;

1. They continually pass off allegations as hard facts, and jump to hysterical conclusions based on these 'facts'. At no point is the possibility that the allegations may be false addressed. The reader is implicitly guided towards the belief that the allegations are true. The fact that the UN and the individuals involved deny any wrongdoing is used as evidence of their guilt.

2. They use highly emotive language to prop up their tenuous conclusions, i.e.

quote:
It also evolved into not only the biggest but the most extravagant, hypocritical, and blatantly perverse relief program ever administered by the UN. But Oil-for-Food is not simply a saga of one UN program gone wrong. It is also the tale of a systematic failure on the part of what is grandly called the international community.


3. They use appeals to ignorance to justify endless investigations into the 'scandal'; for example, demanding to know where the money has gone, since there is often no trace of it. The obvious conclusion (that there was no money in the first place) is simply ignored. Ring any bells?

4. A common trick amongst pro-war folk is to talk about 'Saddam' when they really mean 'Iraq'. This is used to great extent in these articles, leading the reader to believe that Saddam personally oversaw every aspect of the Oil for Food deal.

5. The articles refer to largely right-wing sources as footnotes.

6. The 'scandal' of the Oil for Food is used as an excuse to attack the entire UN. This is hardly a surprise; rightwing Americans are apparently incapable of perspective when it comes to the UN. A UN security guard could be caught downloading child porn, and they'd call for the organisation to be scrapped.

7. It is asserted that Saddam used the Oil for Food money to build up his military, develop WMD and support terrorism. Whatever military forces he built up obviously had virtually no effect. As for the WMD and supporting terrorism, there's no evidence for that either.

8. One of the articles attacks John Kerry and lauds Bush, using the 'scandal' as a proof of Bush's rightness and Kerry's wrongness. There's no real reason to bring up Kerry at all except for cynical electioneering.

9. The fact there have been media stories about the 'scandal' is used as evidence that the allegations are true. After all, there's no smoke without fire...

And so on.

Now, I'd love to know where the money has gone, assuming it even exists, or why, despite capturing loads of high-ranking Iraqis, none of them seem to have been able to point to the money or other definitive proof for the 'scandal'. All we've got is a load of 'documents' from an Iraqi newspaper and rightwing froth.

As for the Guardian article, it's more unproven allegations - it carefully says that the money may have ended up with Saddam, not that it did.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=121568&perpage=50&pagenumber=2

[Sandman]

It would be nice to know what your thoughts are on the matter, Mad Monk. I can't very well have a sensible debate with you when you won't clearly outline what your position is.

The UN is placed under an unremittingly harsh spotlight by the right-wing American media. Individual crimes and mistakes become a failure of the whole organisation.
Allegations of corruption become grotesquely embellished 'facts'. A tiny budget and limited powers becomes 'weakness' - despite these being the very qualities right-wing Americans seek in the federal government.

The harsh light light under which the UN is placed by the US media is a fact, is it not? The European media does not run with the story nearly as much. Now, you could say that it's the Euro media which gives the UN an easy ride, fair enough.

Secondly, am I to take it that you think that the failure of individuals involved in the Oil for Food IS a failure of the whole organisation of the UN? Or that the WHOLE organisation is corrupt, and this is just the tip of the iceberg? Or something else?

Also, in this post I clearly state that individual crimes and mistakes do happen; not that the UN is as 'pure as the driven snow'. Or is this the 'everyones a crook' argument?

Is the UN being blamed for ALL of Saddam's smuggling operations again?

The point here is that Saddam's other ways of making illicit cash (cigarette smuggling, etc) are often painted as being the fault of the UN, even though they had nothing to do with Oil for Food.

It certainly does... if there was evidence. Which there is a notable lack of at the moment.

Note words and phrases like:

'alleged'
'accused'
'according to'
'claims'
'US Patriot Act'

The article says that the Patriot Act allows the US Treasury Department to name alleged money-launderers - in other words, they don't need any evidence.

Now that it's no longer needed, it's been labelled as corrupt by the American right, as usual with no real evidence except frankly dodgy 'documents'. And the French are involved as well. How perfect. France and the UN in one piece of muckraking.

These are my assumptions. That assumption being 'innocent until proven guilty'.

As for the Iraqis starving during the sanctions, that did not happen. The Oil for Food programme kept them fed, and was at the time accepted by the US as reasonably uncorrupt. It was also one of the largest operations the UN has ever undertaken, and was entirely financed by Iraq itself. Without it, the Iraqi people would have starved.

If I remember rightly, Lazarus and the Gimp PWNed me on this one. Iraqis did starve, or at least suffered severe malnutrition.

How long would it take the US to start denouncing the new organisation as corrupt, impotent, bureaucratic and a threat to national sovereignty?

This is a historical argument against some Americans who want to leave the UN and start a new 'democratic alliance'. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were both American ideas that have failed or floundered due to lack of American support - I fail to see why a democratic alliance would be any different.

The last, long post:

This was a mistake. I fell neatly into your trap, MM, of trying to 'reply' to two huge Republican articles, foolishly creating a list reply which was an easy target for the good old 'sentence-by-sentence' rebuttal, resulting in a confused mess.

Instead, I'm going to ask you again, what is your position on the UN? What needs to be done to fix it? Or should it be abolished? I can't deduce it from all the articles you post - they contain conflicting viewpoints, both on the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution.

Before you ask, here's my view: The UN is fundamentally good idea that is hampered by all the usual things affecting a large organisation: inefficiency, corruption, incompetance. But it is hampered to a much greater extent by the intransigence of American conservatives.

[The Mad Monk]

The real beauty of that "last long post" is that I didn't even have to repeat my "'sentence-by-sentence' rebuttal" in the other thread. Your defensiveness to the point of paranoia with regard to the UN is self-evident.

My view is that the UN was a good idea, but decades of lack of proper oversight has led to a culture of corruption that has perhaps become irrecoverable. UN insiders have become so...accustomed...abuses of ethics that they cannot even see what is wrong, and need outsiders to point it out to them. Oil-For-Food is merely the largest known of many examples showing the UN to be sloppy, arrogant, and ineffective. This stands as an example and warning to those who would give such international bodies even more authority than they already have.

As for being "hampered to a much greater extent by the intransigence of American conservatives", this only demonstrates how willing you are to overlook the cancer that threatens to kill what good the UN can do, by allowing it to fall even further into disrepute than it already is. Stop making excuses for them, it only allows them to become even worse!

For god sakes, stop dismissing all the negative press as propaganda. There are real problems here, and ignoring them won't make them go away.

[Sandman]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
The real beauty of that "last long post" is that I didn't even have to repeat my "'sentence-by-sentence' rebuttal" in the other thread. Your defensiveness to the point of paranoia with regard to the UN is self-evident.

My view is that the UN was a good idea, but decades of lack of proper oversight has led to a culture of corruption that has perhaps become irrecoverable. UN insiders have become so...accustomed...abuses of ethics that they cannot even see what is wrong, and need outsiders to point it out to them. Oil-For-Food is merely the largest known of many examples showing the UN to be sloppy, arrogant, and ineffective. This stands as an example and warning to those who would give such international bodies even more authority than they already have.

As for being "hampered to a much greater extent by the intransigence of American conservatives", this only demonstrates how willing you are to overlook the cancer that threatens to kill what good the UN can do, by allowing it to fall even further into disrepute than it already is. Stop making excuses for them, it only allows them to become even worse!

For god sakes, stop dismissing all the negative press as propaganda. There are real problems here, and ignoring them won't make them go away.

Finally, an actual response. If you think I'm defensive to the point of 'paranoia' about the UN, I can only say that I find your loathing of the organisation to be the product of your political leanings, rather than the facts. The belief in a 'corrupt, bloated, arrogant, irrevocably broken UN' is a idiosyncratic feature of American conservatism - it's generally not a trait found in the conservative parties of other nations (apart from a few fringe individuals).

And for the last time, I'm not dismissing 'all' the negative press as propaganda - I've already said that the UN has problems. Now, presumably, since non-Americans don't get the same diet of not-propaganda, we are living under a state of censorship? Because we just don't get the same level of UN-bashing stories which you think are accurate.

Since you say that the your opposition to the UN is based on institutional corruption, you must think that the countries that contribute more per head than the US (Japan, Germany, Britain, France) are being very naive. They don't constantly threaten to cut off their contributions out of concern that the UN suffers from a 'cancer' of corruption and that UN officials can't tell right from wrong. By propping up the UN, are they being like me, paranoid and defensive, allowing the organisation to 'fall further into disrepute'?

I'm surprised that you bother to give Paul Volcker's investigation the time of day. After all, he was appointed by Annan to investigate the Oil for Food programme, and you've posted articles which suggest that the secretary-general is up to his neck in it. I'll bet you don't agree with him when he says:

Volcker told The Associated Press that the investigation found no "systematic mismanagement" of the oil-for-food program. But he said there were serious problems.

"There are obviously problems in the institution, and we have identified some of them," he said. "But the end of this should be a reformed and stronger U.N., because I believe and I know the other committee members believe that the U.N. has an important role to play. But it cannot be effective if it is under suspicion all of the time."

Norm Coleman, a Republican senator, has said that Volcker's enquiry hasn't nearly enough scope to uncover the truth, although Volcker has insisted that he's got enough tools to get the job done. Who's right?

Incidently, almost $9 billion of the Coalition Provisional Authority's budget is unaccounted for, due to bad management. If, by some fluke, it had been the UN Provisional Authority, there's no doubt in my mind that the scandal of the missing billions would been used as a stick with which to bash the UN. And with some justification. But since it's the 'Coalition' which mislaid the money, it'll just be swept under the carpet and forgotten about. Everyone's a crook, right?