Wanna Go A Round With Hanna Rosen Mr. Annan?

While UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was stealing a few headlines the other day with his charge that the US-led war in Iraq was, "illegal," Hanna Rosen was keeping an eye on the UN under Kofi Annan's leadership.

But if Mr. Annan wants to discuss right and wrong in Iraq, which seems to be the real issue, then it is time to talk about baby formula. Why? Because Mr. Annan's preferred means of dealing with Saddam was a mix of U.N. sanctions and the U.N. relief program called Oil-for-Food. And the heart and soul of Oil-for-Food was supposed to be the feeding of sick and hungry Iraqi babies--including the purchase by Saddam, under U.N. auspices, of large amounts of baby formula. When Oil-for-Food was launched in 1996, it was advertised by the U.N. as a response to such horrors as pictures of starving Iraqi children and alarming statistics about infant mortality in Iraq, released by one of the U.N.'s own agencies, Unicef.

It was in service of that U.N. mix of sanctions and humanitarian relief that Mr. Annan after visiting with Saddam in Iraq in 1998 returned to New York to report: "I think I can do business with him."

And oh what a lot of business the U.N. did. Mr. Annan's Secretariat collected more than $1.4 billion in commissions on Saddam's oil sales, all to supervise the integrity of Saddam's $65 billion in oil sales and $46 billion in relief purchases. The official aim of this behemoth U.N. aid operation was solely to help the people of Iraq, while the U.N. waited for sanctions to weaken Saddam enough so he would be either overthrown from within or forced to comply with U.N. resolutions on disarmament. Instead, Saddam threw out the U.N. weapons inspectors for four years, and, by estimates of the U.S. General Accounting Office, fortified his own regime with at least $10.1 billion grafted and smuggled out of Oil-for-Food.
But of all the abuses of Oil-for-Food committed by Saddam--and not only allowed but in effect approved and covered up by Mr. Annan's U.N.--the most cynical has to have been the trade in baby formula. This was one of Saddam's imports that few even among the U.N.'s critics dared question. Who could be so heartless as to object to food for hungry children? And given the secrecy with which Mr. Annan ran Oil-for-Food (as hapless servant of a Security Council packed with big-time business partners of Saddam, such as France and Russia), no one outside the U.N. except Saddam and his handpicked contractors knew much in any event about Baghdad's traffic in baby formula.

The U.N. insisted that the identities of Saddam's contractors and the terms of his deals remain confidential. Even today, though the names have leaked, many of the vital details of these contracts (such as quantity and quality of goods) remain smothered in the continuing secrecy imposed by the U.N.-authorized investigation into Oil-for-Food, led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. And Mr. Volcker, apparently focused mainly on bribery allegations involving officials of the U.N. itself, may never get around to such broader but also important matters as Oil-for-Baby-Food.

But since Saddam's fall, a few windows have opened through which one can glimpse Saddam's U.N.-approved trade in nursery nutrition. Chief among them is a pricing study carried out by the U.S. Defense Department's contract auditing agencies last year, shortly after Saddam's overthrow. Lest anyone suspect the Pentagon of bias, it would of course be handy to draw on other studies as well. But there are none. Mr. Annan's Secretariat, while swimming in cash from its 2.2% commission on Saddam's oil sales, never got around to systematically examining Saddam's contract prices. That was a notable omission, given that Saddam's scam on relief contracts was one of the oldest and simplest in the book: overpaying for goods, using relief funds meant for the Iraqi public; then collecting part of those overpayments in the form of kickbacks.