--- You need to read

--- You need to read this.

It is a tribute to the new American-installed democracy in Iraq that
an Iraqi newspaper has been in the forefront of exposing the racket and
naming the 270 international power brokers who seem to have had their
hands in the till. Here's how the scam allegedly worked: Saddam sold
oil to his friends and allies around the world at deep discounts. The
buyers resold the oil at huge profits. Saddam then got kickbacks of 10
percent from both the oil traders and the suppliers of humanitarian
goods. Iraqi bean counters, fortunately, kept meticulous records.
Coincidence. If you wondered why the French were so hostile to
America's approach to Iraq and even opposed to ending the sanctions
after the 1991 Gulf War, here's one possible explanation: French oil
traders got 165 million barrels of Iraqi crude at cut-rate prices. The
CEO of one French company, SOCO International, got vouchers for 36
million barrels of Iraqi oil. Was it just a coincidence that the man is
a close political and financial supporter of President Jacques Chirac?
Or that a former minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, allegedly
received 12 million barrels from Baghdad? Or that a former French
ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard Merimee, received an allocation of
11 million barrels? Perhaps it was just happenstance, too, that a
French bank with close ties to then French President François
Mitterrand and one of the bank's big shareholders who is close to
Saddam became the main conduit for the bulk of the $67 billion in
proceeds from the oil-for-food program. All told, 42 French companies
and individuals got a piece of this lucrative trade. No matter how
cynical you may be, it's sometimes just plain hard to keep up with the
French.
But they're not alone. Russians received more than 2.5 billion barrels
of the cut-rate crude. Some 1.4 billion barrels went to the Russian
state. Not to be left out of the feeding frenzy, even the U.N. got in
on the action. It received administrative fees of about $2 billion for
the program, which may be fair, but the senior U.N. official in charge
of the program, Benon Sevan, is reported to have received 11.5 million
barrels himself. Cotecna, a Swiss-based firm hired by the U.N. to
monitor the import of the food and medicine to Iraq, hired Kojo Annan,
the son of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a consultant during
the period when the company was assembling and submitting bids for the
oil-for-food program. All of these coincidences were reported by
Claudia Rosett in the National Review. None, surprisingly, were
disclosed by the U.N., Cotecna, or the senior or junior Annan. The
imposition of so-called smart sanctions on Iraq, several years after
the end of the 1991 Gulf War, allowed Saddam to purchase items besides
food and medicine. But some of the things approved by Kofi Annan seem
pretty far afield. There was the $20 million he authorized for an
Olympic sports city for Uday Hussein, Saddam's reprehensible (and now
deceased) oldest son. And then there was the $50 million for TV and
radio equipment for Saddam's ham-handed propaganda machine. This is
food? Gives new meaning to Kofi Annan's statement, in 1998, that Saddam
was a man "I can do business with." And how.

And yet, somehow, the UN is the organization that is the best qualified to take over running the show in Iraq.

How, precisely, would this be a good idea?