Or, could it be that the U.S. is investigating this because someone needs to do so? And perhaps because our own credibility is at stake? And because we don't want to leave these matters in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats anymore, and need to show the world why not?

This story is just beginning to gain momementum. I think it's going to be one of the whoppers of 2005.

I'll speculate that a lot of European senior ministers should be implicated.

And I think it spells the end of the U.N. as we know it. Good riddance.

Actually one of the British news documentary shows, either Panorama or Correspondent, both do excellent work, knew something was wrong several years back - they did a fabulous documentary, from around 1998, 1999, on the fact that the Kurds were not getting their UN Oil for Food money earmarked for their hospitals.
(The Kurds were in the fortunate position that living in the more fertile areas of Iraq, food wasn't a problem for the most part.)

The Kurds knew there was $4 billion dollars earmarked for their hospitals to buy medicine and supplies and in fact they were still trying to get that money after the invasion.

The documentary went to visit the hospitals, their
pharmacies were bare, the doctors were desparate, they barely had aspirin let alone medicines for chemotherapy and the like.

The Kurdish doctors would go and beg the UN for medicine and supplies but they kept getting the run around. In fact the camera crew went along for one visit to the supposed local administrators of the Oil for Food program who just shrugged and told the Kurds it was up to Saddam how the money (aid and supplies) was allocated and they would have to go to Baghdad to speak to the government there.

Uh wait a minute, this is supposed to be a aid program administered by the UN yet the UN is allowing Saddam to allocate the aid. Well that's explains a lot doesn't it, why the Kurds had no medical supplies and the Shias were starving. Fancy that. Of course the Baathist Sunnis were doing just great!

Of course no Kurds with brains were going to go any further south than the boundary of the no fly zone if they valued their life.

The Kurds and the filmmaker even tried to put pressure on UN Headquarters and got no satisfactory answers.

The bottomline is a number of Kurds died of very preventable illnesses and now we know exactly why.

It was bad enough that the UN allowed Saddam to control the distribution of the aid.

It was bad enough when I found out the UN was making a 2 per cent commission on the Oil For Food program which was a blatant conflict of interest as this program, even just the legal side of it, was one of the largest revenue generators for the UN.

Now we know the whole truth and it is appalling.
The UN can't even be relied upon to provide humanitarian aid and they are just as complicit in the deaths of any Iraqis because of the withholding of aid under the Oil For Food program as Saddam is.

I sure hope Hitchens grabs onto this and rubs it in his fellow Lefties' faces.
If the Beeb is covering it, that means it is so bad that not even an anti-war slant can hold back the flood. We knew much of it already of course, but didn't think we could trust the media to deliver the goods.

During the later Clinton years I remember reading a story in the Hartford Courant about how the sanctions were starving ordinary Iraqis, not hurting Saddam. The overall tone of the article would lead one to abandon sanctions and normalize relations with Saddam, as if the terms of his original defeat were to be forgiven...in which case, why bother restraining him in the first place?

Though the costs have been harsh, I have to say, I'm glad it is happening this way instead.