Quote of the Day

Busy banging out the April issue. But did run across this quote by Kofi Annan on the U.N. Oil-for-food program in Iraq. As I reported in the run-up to the war last spring, the largest recipients of U.N. contracts to do business with Saddam's oil regime were Germany and Russia. There were then, and are now, a lot of rumors of, well...impropriety, Halliburton style. "It is highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrongdoing," Annan said today. Sounds like a man who knows there were a lot of hands in the cookie jar...and knows it's only a matter of time before it's front page news. It ought to have been front page news long before this. But it's not the kind of story that fits the "it was all about U.S. lust for oil" mold. Instead, it shows there was a lot of U.N. sanctioned lusting for oil contracts going behind closed doors. Perhaps the U.N. would do better in Iraq than the U.S. Perhaps. But then again, perhaps the U.N. is full of opportunistic crooks hiding behind the veneer of international authority. Maybe more than perhaps.