Kofi and the Scandal Pimps

Routine distortions, exaggerations and unreported context about the United Nations Oil-for-Food program (OFF) makes it arguably one of the worst-covered stories of our times.

That's hardly an accident. The story confirms a cherished piece of the conservative worldview, namely that the U.N. is populated by corrupt, inept and hostile anti-American bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to constrain the United States from using its unrivalled -- but wholly benevolent -- power to influence world affairs.

Oil-for-Food has been used by critics of the U.N. not only to disparage the institution as a whole, as well as the idea of multilateral diplomacy, but also to explain away opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq as being motivated mostly by craven profit-seeking.

Sometimes it's offered as direct justification for the war in Iraq, such as when an editorial in Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times reported, "There are growing questions as to whether Saddam Hussein may have directed program revenues to terrorist organizations." Those "growing questions," as far as anyone can tell, were invented from whole cloth right there at the Washington Times.

But most importantly, OFF has been used as a way of changing the subject. We're supposed to focus on "corruption" at the U.N. and ignore both the actual corruption in the program -- almost all of which was between the regime of Saddam Hussein and international bankers, energy traders and other assorted hucksters, some connected to the Bush administration -- and the moral questions raised by a sanctions program that has been blamed for the deaths of as many as a million Iraqi children under the age of five.

On all counts, the diversion has been a success. For progressives, the most instructive part of the story is how a "scandal" conceived and cultivated by a small group of writers within a small circle of conservative publications has been so thoroughly embraced by the mainstream media. While most of the right's claims about the U.N.'s supposed perfidy are readily debunked, the mainstream press repeats them uncritically.

Although the mainstream media reported that Saddam Hussein was skimming illicit revenues from OFF as early as 1997, it became a "scandal" when a newspaper in Iraq published a list of recipients of Iraqi oil consignments under the program. The list included vocal opponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The source of the list was somewhat dubious: the Baghdad paper credited close associates of Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who had been a driving force behind the U.S.-led invasion.

When the documents appeared on the scene, Chalabi -- who has twice been accused of forgery in the past -- was locked in a political catfight with U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. The lists -- supposedly from the oil ministry -- were not independently confirmed. Blogger Josh Marshall commented that Chalabi "apparently deemed [the documents] too important to let anyone outside his circle see [them]." According to Forbes, the issue of documentation was further muddied when the U.S. military and Iraqi police raided Chalabi's Baghdad home and, according to Chalabi, took documents related to OFF.

Generally, the right's narrative has one insurmountable problem: the scandal that they want the mainstream media to report has very little in common with what actually transpired in the OFF program.

That's a big problem. Several independent investigations, including one by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and another by the CIA's Charles Duelfer, have churned out thousands of pages of reports on OFF. The most recent is the comprehensive $35 million probe conducted by an independent investigative committee headed by the well-respected former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

The Right's "Facts"