Glenn Reynolds has more on the developing UN scandal with the Oil-for-Food program. It’s seeming like this story is set to break wide open at any point. It’s clear billions of dollars were shuffled away from their humanitarian goal and into terrorism, arms dealing, and Saddam’s self-glorification. The mainstream media has largely remained silent on the issue, burying it as much as is possible.
However, I said that it is entirely possible that this story could become simply too large to ignore. It’s becoming like hiding an elephant under some bushes – eventually people are going to notice. FoxNews, unsurprisingly, has been giving the story some coverage, as well as magazines like National Review and The Weekly Standard.
Despite the media’s fawning adoration of Bill Clinton, the Lewinsky scandal was simply too salacious for them to pass up. While the UN scandal isn’t as juicy as a sex scandal, one wonders exactly how long the media can try burying this story.
Unfortunately, I’m cynical about this. The reason why this isn’t a front-page headline on The Washington Post or The New York Times is because the UN has become a sacred cow. The only way this scandal is going to get the attention it deserves is if it ends up taking down Kofi Annan, and even then the media will attempt to spin it to cast the UN as an institution in the most favorable light possible.
The UN, through negligence or outright corruption, funded terrorism, arms smuggling, and human rights abuses. There’s no getting around that argument at this point. The Oil-for-Food program was a complete scam, with Saddam either playing the UN for chumps or the UN willingly playing along. In any case, in a just world, this should be enough to force the UN to take substantive and sweeping action.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a just world. Then again, as Isiah Berlin once wrote:
It is seldom, moreover, that there is only one model that determines our thought; men (or cultures) obsessed at their models are rare, and while they may be more coherent at their strongest, they tend to collapse more violently when, in the end, their concepts are blown up by reality – experienced events, ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ that get in the way.
One wonders that if the snowballing scandals at the UN continue, just how long the media can try to keep them below the fold.
Let’s ask Saddam about that, he’ ll give us the names of the traitors, and there may be some surprise for conservatists.
Actually, if you’d been following the news, we already have the list of people who were given oil. The only Americans on the list was an American documentary filmmaker and Scott Ritter. (Gee, how surprising.)
Nice try, but blaming America first doesn’t work when the records show who was on the take, and it just so happens to be the ones who were loudest in trying to keep the bootheel of Saddam Hussein on the Iraqi people.