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February 18, 2005
Just WHO Was Circumventing the Iraq Oil Embargo?
If you follow the official line from the Bushies and their pals on talk radio, Fox News, and so on, you certainly know that the U.N. is involved in all kinds of corruption related to the oil embargo on Iraq and the oil-for-food program. (This is not surprising since the U.N. is just a big collection of governments.)
What you might not know is that the U.S. government is up to its neck in a similar and related scandal. As the Washington Post reports:
The Treasury Department provided assurances that the United States would not obstruct two companies' plans to import millions of barrels of oil from Iraq in March 2003 in violation of U.N. sanctions, according to an e-mail from one of the companies.
Diplomats and oil brokers have recently said that the United States had long turned a blind eye to illicit shipments of Iraqi oil by its allies Jordan and Turkey. The United States acknowledged this week that it had acquiesced in the trade to ensure that crucial allies would not suffer economic hardships.
But the e-mail, along with others released this week by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs panel's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, provides evidence that the Bush administration directly abetted Jordan's efforts to build up its strategic reserves with smuggled Iraqi oil in the weeks before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Furthermore, reports the Post, as bad as the U.N. corruption was, this was even worse:
The illicit oil exports took place outside the Iraq oil-for-food program, which the United Nations administered from 1996 to 2003. While allegations of corruption and mismanagement in that program are under investigation by five congressional committees, the Justice Department and a U.N.-appointed panel, the illicit oil exports outside the program have received less scrutiny. According to investigators, Iraq received more revenue from those exports than from the alleged oil-for-food kickbacks.
"The bulk of [Saddam Hussein's] illicit oil sale revenues actually came from the money he received from unregulated sales of Iraqi oil, entirely outside of the oil-for-food program, primarily to Turkey, Jordan and Syria," Levin said at a hearing Tuesday on the U.N. management of Iraqi oil revenue. "We and the rest of the world looked the other way from those sales even though they were prohibited by the U.N. sanctions regime."
So next time you hear Limbaugh, Hannity, and company start beating up on the U.N. (certainly a deserving target), just remember that the U.N. scandal is dwarfed by the Clinton/Bush scandal. (This started under Clinton but continued right up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.) Hypocrisy, thy name is Uncle Sam!
(Link courtesy Antiwar.com.)
Posted by Mike Tennant at February 18, 2005 11:14 AM
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