Stories are popping up everywhere about a leaked memo (PDF) from a United Nations’ internal audit of the Oil for Food program. Journalist Tim Wood posted the full details on the MineWeb.com website. The information he has collected is very extensive, so, I am going to list the links from the email he has sent me, from which you can follow the trail.

[Via Friends of Saddam]

Wow! This is ugly! You don’t have to be a MBA to see the seriousness and the magnitude of the management problems found in the audit of Cotecna. Despite the understaffing of inspectors by Cotecna they found $111 million dollar discrepancy between what the UN reported as humanitarian supplies imported and what actually showed up at the border. Let me see if I can summarize the problems:

1. Cotecna is involved in contract fraud against the UN and it appears to be getting special treatment at circumventing the contract.
2. Despite Cotecna’s incompetence, they have partially documented a huge fraud issue concerning the amount of humanitarian supplies being reported by the UN. Using their numbers as an estimate of the fraud in the program, the UN was overpaying for supplies there by a margin of 61%. This estimate corresponds nicely with the allegations by Kurdish leaders that half of all humanitarian supplies to the region were stolen.
3. This memo confirms that another part of the story of bribery, corruption, and influence peddling at the UN. The facts confirm the procedures used and partially confirms the overall size of the estimated 10 billion dollar scandal.
4. This memo confirms that the UN knew about the problems and chose to do nothing!

The link above provides a lot of resources that attempt to explain the memo but the best summary is found in the mineweb.com article, Leaked UN audit proves Oil-for-Food shambles. In that article it says,

Cotecna Inspection S.A., a privately owned and managed Swiss “global trade facilitation” firm, won UN contract PD/CON/324/98 which was worth $40.9 million dollars between February 1999 and July 2002. Whereas UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, whose son, Kojo, worked for Cotecna, is now adopting a constructionist view of the contract disclosure clauses, the OIP was decidedly generous with Cotecna when it came to pecuniary and operating clauses.For example, the audit report reveals that Cotecna over-billed the UN to the tune of $335,328 in just one year because it deployed less staff than obligated. The OIP shrugged off the loss and told its internal auditors that future invoices would be matched to actual staffing. Similar contracting abuses had been uncovered in audits from prior years involving the OIP, especially involving the oil services contract. Clearly, few of the earlier admonishments were taken seriously.

The most deplorable disclosure highlights why Kurdish leaders have insisted that half of all humanitarian supplies to the region were stolen, and why the OIOS found in a 1999-2000 audit that the UN was overpaying for supplies there by a margin of 61%.

As good a time as any.

Ted Leung is a thoughtful and not flamboyant blogger. He uses his weblog well to think out loud, and by seeing the map of his thought processes, I learn more than just about his conclusions, I also learn how he got them. This was a point that Larry Lessig made on Saturday in the great free-wheeling discussion we had at the end of the iLaw conference. He said even if no one reads your blog, you get something out of writing publicly that you can't get otherwise. Writing makes you smarter, I said, when other people expressed disbelief. But I read Ted, every time he updates, because he's a smart guy who get smarter, and helps me do that too. He makes me say Bing a lot. And then Bing Bing. And even occasionally a Bing Bing Bing.

Anyway, I can see this is going to be a rambler, because Ted's piece is the fulcrum I'm going to use to announce something important, because I want you to think about this announcement in the context of his current piece, because it exactly reflects my thinking.

As you may know, I have left UserLand. It's been almost two years, and while in some ways I wish I were there to drive the products and compete with the great companies in the blogging space, I know that I can't do it. I don't think a lot of people know that I left for health reasons, but I did.

Anyway, these days UserLand is largely a company that markets and develops Manila and Radio. My concern was when will UserLand get around to enhancing and improving the “kernel” — the large base of C code that runs Manila and Radio — the scripting language, object database, verb set, server, multi-threaded runtime, content management framework. It's been several years since there was a meaningful update of that code.

Products that Manila and Radio compete with don't have their own kernels, they build off development environments created by others. For example, Movable Type is written in Perl. WordPress is PHP. Blogger is Java. UserLand's products are different because they build on a private platform. For a long time we saw this as an advantage, the UserLand runtime is very rich and powerful, and offered performance benefits. When a new layer came on, for example the CMS, when it got stable and mature, we'd “kernelize” it, so it would be super-fast. But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn't need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand.

Here's another angle. In 1987 we sold Living Videotext to Symantec, and along with it, sold them our products, ThinkTank, Ready and MORE. I appreciate what Symantec did for us, I'm still living off the money I made in the public stock offering, but the products died inside Symantec. I'm not blaming them for that, because it's very likely they would have died inside Living Videotext had we not been acquired. But some good products disappeared. To this day people ask me what became of MORE, and tell me how advanced it was, and how nothing has replaced it. It's a sad story, and a shame, that the art of outlining took such a hit. I swore this would never happen again. There are a lot of good ideas in that base of software that you won't find elsewhere. If it disappeared it would be a loss like the MORE loss.

To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure did to me. But I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company's interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it. And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this.

We decided this quite some time ago, but waited for the right moment to start discussing it publicly. It seems now is the right time, or as good a time as any.

[Scripting News]

I have to say I expected this to happen. I have enjoyed Radio but desired a few more features. Templates are easy to modify but hard to get right. Using CSS, creating valid xhtml, and scripting should be alot easier. Maybe if there is sufficient interest open source will save it from extinction. —bill

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John Ensign (R-Nevada) today introduced legislation laying the groundwork for a full-scale, thorough investigation into alleged corruption at the United Nation’s oil-for-food program. Without a proper accounting, U.S. contributions to the U.N. general budget would be cut by 10 percent in FY 2005 and 20 percent in FY 2006.

[Via Friends of Saddam]

This will be a good gauge at how hot this issue really is. I think our invasion of Iraq has the rest of world suitably scared that we just might get out of the UN. Maybe we can find a middle ground with a set of reforms that will prevent future genocides and corruption. We could call is something nice like, UN reforms to improve the effectiveness and accountability.

Reason Online.

Fools and idiots

Fools for Communism
In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — the cream of American academia — in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”

Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry.

Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings. Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was “wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened.” A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.

One of the most striking revelations in the exposure of the Jayson Blair disaster at The New York Times was his fabrication of an entire visit to the West Virginia farm of POW Jessica Lynch’s family, including detailed descriptions of rivers and cattle herds that did not exist. Lynch’s parents read the story, laughed at the ludicrous falsehoods, but made no attempt to correct them. It never occurred to them that there was any point. Anybody who reads papers or watches television news knows how rare corrections are.

Glenn Garvin
Reason Online

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Useful idiots
The collapse of Europe's Christian monarchies in the aftermath of the Enlightenment resulted in at least three distinct solutions to the problem of how to organize society in a post-Christian world. One, which ultimately won approval in most Western nations, stressed the freedom of the individual, and gave rise to institutions that favored it, both politically (democracy) and economically (the free-market economy, or capitalism). Another, drawing on atavistic impulses allegedly resident in particular societies, and fueled by the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism, resulted in the totalitarian regimes we know as “fascist”: Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and their imitators.

The third, insisting on its strictly scientific origins, professed to have discovered “the laws of history,” under which capitalism (defined as the exploitation of workers by those owning the means of production) would be overthrown by the workers and replaced by a state which would itself control the means of production. This “socialist” state would then plan the national economy scientifically, on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

It would be foolish to underestimate the appeal of this third solution to the modern mind. The Enlightenment's central achievement, after all, had been to replace faith with reason—to make mankind, with the aid of science, the arbiter of its own destiny. Socialism, as described above, seemed to many a 19th- and 20th-century mind nothing more than the application of this technique to the problem of economics on a national scale.

A century on, we have learned better. The challenge posed by the fascist nations was faced and disposed of in the first half of the 20th century. The second half was consumed in a decisive struggle between the heirs of the Enlightenment's two competing traditions: the tradition of freedom, and the tradition of state power, which, it soon transpired, inevitably resulted in the enslavement of the people the state purported to serve.

But it should not be surprising that many people in the Western world have always found it difficult to condemn Communism quite as wholeheartedly as they condemned fascism. Communism, and socialism more generally, at least assertedly appealed to science for their justification. Perhaps (many thought) their totalitarian tendencies were not inevitable but simply the result of circumstances.

In addition, and even worse, a good many intellectuals in the West were simply blind to the negative aspects of Communism. In the 1920s and 1930s they had become convinced that Communism was actually superior to Western societies, and no amount of evidence to the contrary — even eyewitness evidence — could change their minds. World War II, in which Britain and the United States became the military allies of “good old Joe,” briefly made this mindset even easier to maintain, and the outbreak of the Cold War between the former allies found these people silently (or in some cases quite vocally) sympathetic to the Communist cause. As a result, the world's free societies were forced to wage the Cold War with far less than the wholehearted support of many liberal and leftist intellectuals. In one way or another, and to one degree or another, they effectively supported the policies and purposes of the Soviet Union.

Lenin reputedly referred to these Western intellectual defenders of Communism as “useful idiots,” and this is the sobriquet Mona Charen confers on them in the title of her book chronicling their statements and activities. As a reference source, it will be absolutely invaluable to scholars for generations to come. For the rest of us, it provides a sharp reminder of just how stubbornly many liberals resisted this country's efforts to contain, and ultimately defeat, the deadly threat of international Communism.

William Rusher
The Claremont Institute

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Keeping promises

Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton who stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital and told Mike that when he could run a mile they would go run together. True to his word President Bush called Mike every month to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on a one mile run. Not something you'll see in the news but seeing the President taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and give hope was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life.

[The Braden Files]

ED CONE ASKS what we’re trying to accomplish in Iraq:

What does it mean to stay the course? What are our goals there, now that Saddam is gone? When are we done? Haven’t we made the point we wanted to make to other governments that might support terror?

I recommend his post, and we’re pretty much in agreement (his question isn’t rhetorical, but he’s for staying and getting it right). Here are my thoughts, for what they’re worth. There was an alternate plan (the "low hanging fruit" strategy focusing on Somalia, Sudan, etc.). But we went to Iraq, I think, for several reasons:

First, we needed to make the point Ed describes. It’s dangerous to be on our bad side, even if you’re a powerful dicatator with a large army and lots of bribed foreigners. That point has been made.

Second, we couldn’t have a powerful, rich dictator with WMD programs and terrorist connections, who hated us, operating in the region without facing serious handicaps in our efforts elsewhere. That’s taken care of, too.

Third, invading Iraq let us credibly extend that threat to other terror-supporting nations like Syria, Iran and, to some degree, Saudi Arabia. There’s no question that they feel threatened — in fact, it seems likely that they’re sending fighters into Iraq as a way of mounting a "spoiling attack" intended to make us less likely to move against them. And we appear to be returning the favor in a lower-profile way. (And, on a more overt level, the Bush Administration is putting sanctions pressure on Syria.)

Fourth, over the longer term, we felt that a de-Saddamized Iraq provided an opportunity to produce an Arab state that would be neither a theocracy nor an autocracy, but a democratic model that would undercut Arab dictatorships (a root cause of terror, you know!) and terrorists themselves throughout the region. The dictators and terrorists certainly seem worried about that, as evidenced by their efforts — and the efforts of their propaganda arm, Al Jazeera — to undercut that project.

As mentioned below, there’s some indication that we’re succeeding in this. I’d like to see elections sooner, rather than later. The Zarqawi memo, which certainly seems to have accurately predicted the terrorists’ actions, indicated that the terrorists felt that democracy and self-determination in Iraq would be devastating to their cause. And elections in Iraq so far have indicated no great support for either theocracy or a return to autocracy.

This is a process, not an event. We can turn over sovereignty June 30, and (as I hope) have elections in July, but that won’t — as I said earlier — turn Iraq into Connecticut overnight. (Then again, maybe we should aim higher. . . ). But by the standards of the Arab world, things are already improving there — charges of torture are actually newsworthy! — and as I noted earlier, the U.S. strategy seems, wisely, to be to get the Iraqis involved in solving their own problems as much as possible.

I agree with Ed that we will, and should, have troops there in significant numbers for quite a while. But their role should be, more and more, as ultimate guarantors, not day-to-day police. Iraq is, by the standards of much of the world, well-off and well-educated. Its people, though still shell-shocked by a Stalinist state, have been pretty sensible — despite early reports to the contrary, they weren’t rising up in big numbers to back Sadr and the Fallujah revolt, but rather the contrary.

The goal should be a self-governing Iraq, under a legitimate government and a reasonable constitution, as soon as possible. At least, that’s how it looks to me.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Jahnke emails:x

One more thing needs to be added to your list of reasons for going into Iraq. That is this: The pre-war situation in and around Iraq was unstable and unsustainable. The 10-year-old sanctions and no-fly-zone regime was about worn out. The requirements for policing the no-fly zones were a destabilizing force in the region and the sanctions were blamed for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children each year. Demands to lift the sanctions were increasing (partly, as we now know, under the influence of massive bribes). Truly, the incomplete 1991 war needed to be ended. Either Saddam or the sanctions had to be taken down. In the wake of 9/11 and amidst Afganistan, we simply could not afford to give Saddam such a victory.

Good point.

[Via Instapundit.com]

THE SECRETARY-GENERAL’S JOB Former New York State Senator Roy M. Goodman stated in a letter to the New York Post that “faulting” Annan’s work for his possible role in the Oil-for-Food scandal is “counterproductive” to our diplomatic efforts in Iraq….

[Via Friends of Saddam]

When you look at Mr. Annan’s role in the Oil-for-Food scandal, his role supervising the UN mishap that contributed to the massacre at Srebrenica, and the UN mishaps that contributed to the Rwanda genocide, you see a very sad track record. I do not blame him for these events but I cannot ignore the fact that he was directly involved in supervising the UN actions. The possiblity that the success of our diplomatic efforts in Iraq depend on Mr. Annan’s reputation is a mistake. In fact the opposite is probably true. His reputation is associated with several major diplomatic failures by the UN and it is reasonable to assume that UN should have done much better or at least learned from their mistakes. If we continue to ignore recent UN history it is reasonable to conclude that involvement of the UN in forming a new government in Iraq will be the kiss of death. There is so much to fix at the UN and too little time for Iraq. I fear for the continued loss of American and Iraqi lives in Iraq but I do not see the UN as part of a viable long term solution.