Iraq and Oil-for-Food: The Real Story

This is part two of a two-part series covering the fallout from U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. For more on this story, read part one: "Kofi and the Scandal Pimps."

Despite the right's feverish attempts to portray the United Nations as a scandal-plagued body of incompetents, independent investigations have found no endemic corruption in the institution.

So you don't have to be an apologist for the U.N. to debunk the usual claims. There were isolated instances of corruption in the program, including one involving a senior U.N. official in the Secretariat in New York. There were also instances in which the U.N. failed to use "best practices" in acquisitions, bookkeeping and program management.

But the most scandalous aspect of the sanctions in place against Iraq between 1991 and 2003 remains the one shrouded in mist and left unrecognized in most Oil-for-Food (OFF) reporting: the incredible destructiveness and high human toll of the sanctions regime demanded by the U.S. and Britain after the first Gulf War.

That context is important for understanding the whole story. In early 1991, the U.S. led a U.N.-sanctioned shellacking of the Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait -- a small oil dictatorship -- the year before.

That war, like the one that would follow a dozen years later, was based largely on a claim that would prove to be false: that Iraq had amassed a huge invasion force of 250,000 troops and 1,500 tanks on the Saudi border and were poised to take over Saudi Arabia, a much more significant oil dictatorship.

In February of 1991, Iraq withdrew from Kuwait and George H.W. Bush halted military operations. He stopped short of deposing Saddam Hussein in large part because the move might fracture the broad coalition that his administration had built.

He would later comment rather presciently, "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

But while nobody except for the "crazies in the basement" -- the neocons -- thought occupying Iraq was a good idea, there was broad international support for a sanctions program that would prevent the Iraqi government from re-acquiring the type of chemical and biological weapons that it possessed in the 1980s, or from acquiring nuclear weapons.

In 1992 Clinton was elected, and he inherited a tough situation: Iraq was nominally sovereign (except for "no-fly" zones over her north and south), headed by a petulant dictator, and the sanctions were not weakening the regime, they were killing innocent Iraqis.

Estimates of the number of children who died of malnourishment and disease under the program range to over a million. In 1996, that tragic scandal was bathed ever so briefly in the light of day when Leslie Stahl asked Secretary of State Madeline Albright on 60-minutes: "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

That rare moment of public candor, although barely discussed in the media, ignited a firestorm among foreign policy elites. The Clinton administration found itself in a pickle. On the one hand, institutional inertia had set in in D.C. and New York: The State Department, Pentagon and CIA all believed lifting the sanctions would result in an unacceptable threat to the region. On the other hand was domestic politics.

To Clinton's right, Republicans like Henry Hyde, R-Ill., were waiting to pounce on the Democrat for being soft on dictators, and to his left, a hue and cry was rising about the innocents dying as a result of U.S. policy.

Our closest allies, the Brits, also had reason to get a relief operation of some kind in place in Iraq. The same year that Albright made her "worth it" comment, the British Conservative Party took a firestorm of heat over a report that alleged it had sold weapons to the Hussein government prior to the first Gulf War.