The so-called Oil for Food scandal obfuscates the real issue—the sanctions imposed against Iraq by a maidservant United Nations (and enforced by US and British warplanes) were responsible for killing more than a million people, half of them defenseless children. Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned his post in 1997. “I don’t want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide,” said Halliday. Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, also resigned. “How much longer can democratically elected governments hope to get away with justifying policies that punish the Iraqi people for something they did not do, through economic sanctions that target them in the hope that those who survive will overthrow the regime? Is international law only applicable to the losers? Does the UN security council only serve the powerful?” von Sponeck and Halliday wrote for the Guardian in November, 2001.

In fact, the rubber stamp UN Security Council does “only serve the powerful,” as it demonstrates repeatedly. In regard to Iraq, the UN imposed a flurry of resolutions—660, 661, 678, 686, 687, 688, 707, 715, 986, 1284, and finally 1441, this last demanding “an accurate full, final, and complete disclosure” of Iraq’s illusory weapons of mass destruction—resolutions we may rightfully consider stepping stones to Bush’s illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Bush used UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (an “anti-terrorism measure”) to claim Iraq provided “shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments…. And al-Qaida terrorists escaped from Afghanistan are known to be in Iraq,” all of this not only patently false, but an engineered lie, as we now know, and some of us knew at the time. Bush and the neocons used 1441 as a carte blanche excuse to invade Iraq and kill over 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Of course, there was a whimper of protest from the United Nations when Bush invaded, but this was less than pathetic, and in fact was used by neocon cheerleaders to demonstrate how the UN is rife with America haters and Saddam appeasers. Naturally, the self-righteous squawk of the neocons, attacking the UN and “Old Europe,” dominated headlines and sound-bites across the subservient corporate media. Obviously, the UN’s rubber stamp is not large enough.

Instead of concentrating on the criminal nature of the sanctions, we are subjected to neocon recrimination and the accusations of a former central banker, Paul Volker, who heads an “independent” commission tasked with investigating the Oil for Food scandal. “More than 2,000 firms that participated in the UN’s oil-for-food programme were involved in bribes and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime,” reports the Guardian. Of course, this should not be surprising—bribes and kickbacks are business as usual for many corporations. Even so, former central banker Volker didn’t come down too hard on these corporations. “The identification of a particular company in the report does not necessarily mean that that company as opposed to an agent … made unauthorised [payments] or even knew about illicit payments,” said Volker. In other words, individuals will be ferreted out and made to pay for the sins of their employers—once again, business as usual.

Instead of taking down multinational corporations, select political opponents are to be skewered—for instance British MP George Galloway. “Mr Galloway was not in the Commons to hear himself compared to Lord Haw-Haw, the nickname given to the infamous Nazi propagandist and convicted traitor William Joyce who was hanged in 1946,” reports the UK Telegraph, a Brit neocon newspaper successfully sued by Galloway for fabricated lies against him. In fact, so eager are Galloway’s enemies to get him—because his sharp-tongued criticisms of the Iraq invasion and occupation are spot on—Denis MacShane, the former Foreign Office minister, called for a joint committee of the Commons and the US Congress to grill Galloway and either send him into the political wilderness or off to the hoosegow.

Meanwhile, understanding well how the United Nations is manipulated by the United States, Russia has called for the “Independent Inquiry Committee” (so independent it is controlled by a former central banker) to disclose its sources. Russia figures prominently in Volker’s report—in fact, the country tops the list—not surprising since Russia was against the US-UN sanctions, designed to kill as many Iraqis as possible. “We were in touch several times with the commission and in a number of cases the documents they showed us were fake, in particular the signatures of Russian officials,” claimed Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Siphoning off a billion or so dollars from the Oil for Food program—if indeed the accusations are true (and at least some of the accusations appear to be based on forged documents)—pales in comparison to the crimes committed under the sanctions imposed against Iraq. Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Minor (and the Brit poodle Blair) are responsible for killing well over a million Iraqis. Of course, this is a minor issue for established sociopaths and war criminals, for instance Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who said: “I think this is a very hard choice [killing 500,000 Iraqi children] but the price—we think the price is worth it.” As Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting explains, this quote—so instrumental in revealing the mindset of the cold-blooded sociopathic neolib elite—appeared but once in the corporate press after nine eleven.

Meanwhile, the search criteria “oil for food” used on the Google News Search site produces “about 17,500? results.