Oil-for-Food: It Worked!

When he was elected to a second term as UN Secretary General in 2001, Kofi Annan appeared in the public eye with the combined halos of King and Gandhi. Then came the flood of half-baked slander over the alleged "oil-for-food scandal." The inquiry into the oil-for-food program, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, was the direct result of a conservative media storm accusing Annan of influencing the program in favor of his son and financing Saddam Hussein. In the febrile words of Charles Krauthammer, it was the "biggest financial scandal in the history of the world."

A week before the UN's sixtieth anniversary summit, the report issued by Volcker's committee effectively cleared Annan and the UN of the vast majority of the corruption charges the media had been throwing at him. Unfortunately, the report mostly eschewed analysis, taking a "just the facts" approach that allowed UN-baiters to seize on the parts they wanted and ignore the rest.

By the time John Bolton turned up as the Grinch who tried to steal the summit, conservative efforts to erode the moral authority of the UN had been successful enough that Annan had lost most of the moral leverage needed to name and shame the spoilers. The situation would have been worse if the Katrina debacle had not undermined the usual rhetoric about UN mismanagement.

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