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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Ian Williams Fan Club accepting new members

I remember 2002 as, among other things, the Year I Didn’t Know Whom To Trust.  The left wing of the left seemed to me to have gone right off the rails, denouncing the war in Afghanistan as an imperialist occupation and then, in the same breath, complaining that the Taliban was regrouping while Bush-Halliburton turned its attention to Iraq.  I could only gather that this wing wanted US forces out of Afghanistan and a more thorough routing of the Taliban, plus a pony.  But the right wing of the left seemed to me to have hopped right onto the Bush-Halliburton rails, ready to ride ‘em all the way to Baghdad and Beyond.  Christopher Hitchens led the charge, of course, but many (more circumspect and less incendiary) liberals joined him, sometimes for “humanitarian” reasons.  My friends and allies were horrified.  “With these preparations for war in Iraq, George Bush is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name,” some people said.  “Uh, no,” others replied.  “Actually, it’s worse than that—Michael Ignatieff himself is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name.” Everyone I knew that year had a Theory of Hitchens, the most compelling of which, I think, was that he had suffered the fate of Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black, and his body was being occupied by an enormous bug.  But every time people like me would take their distance from Hitchens’ lurch to the right, we would be bumped from behind by guys like Ed Herman, who went a few rounds with me in Z (online) in the course of arguing that my opposition to war in Iraq was in fact a form of support for war in Iraq.  (Herman has since moved on to bigger and better things, like denying that the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica really happened.) For a while, it looked like the Party that Approved of One but Only One Military Response to al-Qaeda, namely, the destruction of the training camps and the removal of the Taliban (whom we considered a rogue government inhabiting a failed state) but not a foolish, illegal, and counterproductive war in Iraq, was small enough to hold its meetings in a coffeehouse.  Without taking up all the tables, either.  And while we were flanked by people to our left calling us cruise missile leftists and shills for Bush, and people to our right calling us appeasers and neo-isolationists, we muttered to ourselves, “you know, both these camps agree that Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same enterprise—though one calls that enterprise ‘imperialism’ and the other calls it ‘liberation.’ Whereas we think one thing was a strike against al-Qaeda and the other is a PNAC project that has nothing to do with 9/11.  What do we have to say for ourselves?”

Well, I don’t want to revisit those dark days minute by minute, not now when we should be focusing all our attention on how the Bush Administration is replaying the second term of the Nixon Administration (and I so hope someone is taping everything for us—and that there won’t be any mysterious erasures this time!).  I just wanted to say that I came out of 2002 with profound respect for the work of Danny Postel, Mark Danner, and Ian Williams.  Flying below the radar of the Celebrity Deathmatches between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and more recently George Galloway, these writers have taken on post-9/11 politics with serious intelligence and almost zero fanfare.

So I thought I’d try to embarrass Williams with some fanfare.  His latest short essay, on the UN Oil-for-Food program, is available only to Nation subscribers, but (a) you should go ahead and get yourselves a Nation subscription (just say you’re a member of the Williams Fan Club), and (b) I can give you a Nation subscriber’s sense of why I say (a).

Far from being a failure, by any rational standards oil-for-food was a success—so much so, in fact, that the United States asked the UN to maintain it six months into the occupation. (Citizens of the Gulf Coast might have welcomed the program’s expertise last month, too.)

The [Volcker] inquiry did identify $8 billion of revenue for Saddam—nothing to do with oil-for-food, though. These billions came from oil trades with US allies, condoned and in many cases facilitated by the United States.  In fact, Volcker’s committee found that US officials were fine with Saddam profiting from these trades; they only became agitated when Syria and Iran began to take part. The sole finding of corruption directly tied to oil-for-food was that Benon Sevan, head of the $100 billion program, reported $147,000 in gifts over four years from a now deceased aunt in Cyprus; the committee suspected it was from oil-trade commissions from a company run by friends of Sevan.

The Volcker committee didn’t look into the more than $9 billion in oil-for-food surpluses given to US occupation authorities in Iraq. No accounting of these funds has been provided, either to Congress or to the UN monitoring board. Richard Goldstone, a former Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor who served on the committee, says, “The fate of the cash handed over to the Coalition Provisional Authority was not in the committee’s mandate” but adds that “the report largely rebutted the wild claims made in some of the media about corruption in the UN itself.”

We can be sure that Congressional committees mining oil-for-food for political advantage will also steer clear of CPA corruption. Expect to hear little about cases like that of Custer Battles, a security company set up by defense consultant Scott Custer and Fox News commentator Michael Battles that’s accused of looting the CPA of $50 million. The US courts have ruled that those responsible can be prosecuted only if they stole US money. If it came from the UN, they get off scot-free.

Williams has worked this beat before—in a short May 2004 piece (subscription required, hint hint) and in a more substantial (definitive, I think) analysis of “The Right’s Assault on Kofi Annan” in January of this year (free and open to the Internets public).  So if you know a friendly neighborhood wingnut who likes to go on about Annan and the UN and Oil-for-Food in the way wingnuts will, you should consider sending him or her this handy three-pack of essays, courtesy of the Ian Williams Fan Club.

Posted by Michael on 10/12 at 12:16 PM
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