| dbp:quote
|
- The bad news, therefore, is that the UN proved unequal to the task of preventing a rogue regime from stealing some of its own money. The good news is that this same UN machinery proved equal to the task of preventing that same regime from fielding WMD, developing nuclear weapons and reconstituting a military threat to its neighbors. Most observers would conclude that the UN, however inadequate its financial oversight, certainly got its priorities right.
The UN sanctions regime against Iraq, including the Oil for Food program is worth close scrutiny not because it was a scandal, although scandal there was, but because taken as a whole, it is the most successful use of international sanctions on record. Documenting the why and wherefores of that success is as important as correcting the shortfalls that allowed a rogue regime, in connivance with unscrupulous international businessmen, to siphon funds from UN-administered Iraqi accounts. (en)
- "Al-Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As with the story of Zarqawi and his network, I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al-Qaida. Fortunately, this operative is now detained and he has told his story. ... The support that this detainee describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qaida associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abdallah al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gasses. Abdallah al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful." (en)
|
| dbp:text
|
- 1990.0 (dbd:second)
- Inferring oil as the war's presiding motive from the fact that US forces showed extraordinary solicitude towards Iraq's energy infrastructure assumes that if the war was not for oil then the invaders would not care about it. Gulf energy resources have always been a vital US interest. On no other occasion has the US had to occupy a country to secure them. Regardless of why Iraq was invaded, it is reasonable to assume that an occupier would exploit rather than destroy its assets. Indeed, the neoconservatives used oil both as an incentive to get the energy industry onside and as a disincentive against dissent, threatening exclusion from future oil contracts. Oil may have played a part in the thinking of some policy makers – as Juan Cole argues it had in Dick Cheney's – but even Cole admits that Iraq was invaded only because the Israel lobby was blocking all other means of access to it. If oil were indeed the overriding concern, it is likelier that we would have US boots on Venezuelan ground. After all, nowhere were US interests more threatened than in Latin America, and few governments had a more provocative attitude towards the US than Hugo Chavez's. Yet, the US was able to do little when the Venezuelan government rewrote laws to claim 30 per cent of the oil profits for the national oil company. (en)
|
