The Triangle

Issue date: 10/8/04 Section: Ed-Op

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The United Nations began with a bang. Well, two big bangs. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August of 1945 signified a beginning to a new world order of peace. Or, at least, an attempt at it. The League of Nations had already failed years earlier due to internal squabbling and legal bottlenecks. This was the opportunity for a new beginning and the possibility of one united planet, whose common goal was to promote peaceful coexistence.

As of today, this whole dream has faded into the wind, and failed miserably. As of today, the United Nations is nothing more than a combination of the League of Nations and a corrupt, for-profit charity organization. Granted, in the past, the United Nations has, as a whole, provided relief to certain countries in need. There are still many other countries that are on their proverbial "to-do" list, and others which have been flat out ignored. The past and present actions of the United Nations detail a laundry list of fraud, dishonesty, and devious practices.

After the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was allowed to sell his oil supplies to countries in exchange for resources to buy food for his citizens. The so called "Oil for Food" program generated $67 billion in profits to pay for food. While this sounds like a capital idea, it was a cursed project from the start. Saddam held the money in escrow and restricted it to French Banks. In turn, he gave oil vouchers, allegedly at lower-than-market prices, to certain high level individuals in the French Interior Ministry, the Russian Communist Party and President's office, the Ukraine Communist Party, and the U.N. Assistant Secretary General. The individuals involved still deny wrong-doing, but their involvement is key to understanding the problems with the program.

So imagine our surprise when France and Russia opposed the War in Iraq. Peace mongers, indeed. No longer would their governments be able to benefit from Saddam's cheap oil and payoffs. Not only did these officials receive cheap oil, but Saddam hid more than $10 billion, according to the Government Accounting Office, from the escrow accounts and redirected it to Iraqi assets. Also, Iraq managed to sell the oil through pipelines to its neighboring countries for a price markup sometimes exceeding 20 percent. And all of these profits went right back to Saddam's crippling regime.

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