Meanwhile, back at the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, the news leaked Friday that Secretary-General Kofi Annan has picked Paul Volcker to lead a three-man panel to investigate what we now know was a Saddam Hussein skimming operation. What we'd also like to know is why it is taking so long for the Volcker appointment to be formally announced.
 
    Mr. Annan first offered the job to Mr. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, some two weeks ago. It shouldn't take this long to close the deal -- unless some members of the U.N. Security Council really don't want a probe. Word is that Mr. Volcker, who is nobody's toady, doesn't want to lend his reputation to this exercise unless the Security Council passes a new resolution calling on members to cooperate with his team. Under pressure from the U.S. and Britain, Mr. Annan has agreed.
 
    But, lo, the Russians are objecting to any resolution. "We don't mind for the Secretary-General to appoint the commission but we don't see the need to support his decision in the form of a resolution," says Russia's U.N. Ambassador Gennady Gatilov. In other words, he wants Mr. Volcker to serve as eyewash for the U.N. but without the political clout to expose what really happened. We don't suppose it is a coincidence, comrade, that Russians were among Saddam's best business partners. No word yet on where the French stand on a resolution, but we can guess.
 
    The Oil for Food program was designed to let Iraq sell some oil to finance food and humanitarian aid for Iraqis hurt by sanctions against Saddam's regime. But we have learned that Saddam skimmed off as much as $10 billion to build his own palaces and pay off apologists for his regime around the world.

    Only last week, Detroit businessman Shakir al-Khafaji admitted to the Financial Times that he received Oil for Food allocations. Mr. al-Khafaji had earlier denied receiving such allocations in an interview with our Robert Pollock, who recently reported that Mr. al-Khafaji had helped to finance a pro-Saddam documentary by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and had donated to antiwar Congressional Democrats. Another hearing in Congress is scheduled this week into what is already the worst corruption scandal in U.N. history.
 
    A new resolution would be especially helpful because Security Council nations and members of the U.N. Secretariat have been implicated in the scandal. If Mr. Volcker is going to conduct a credible probe, he'll need the political clout that a new resolution would provide. We trust he's also asking for an independent staff of his own choosing and ample funding. And while a public accounting is necessary, we hope Mr. Volcker will also conduct the probe with an eye to U.S. banking and other laws that may have been broken.
 
    All of this relates not merely to a "look backwards," as Mr. Gatilov dismissively puts it, but directly to the U.N.'s current ambitions in Baghdad. Iraqis now know that the U.N. and some of its leading members conspired with their former dictator to fleece them of their national wealth. The very least Iraqis should expect is that the U.N. will come clean about its sins and punish those who profited at their expense. George Bush, John Kerry and others who now want to give the U.N. control in Baghdad should also settle for nothing less.

    The prospects of the United Nations taking over the transition in Iraq may now be fatally compromised. The world body is caught up in a welter of allegations and evidence suggesting strongly that a noble effort of humanitarian assistance was tainted by greed, bribery, and the most venal kind of power politics. The U.N. was supposed to oversee the oil-for-food program that allowed Saddam Hussein to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy essential food and medicine for the Iraqi people. At least $10 billion, evidently, went into the pockets of political operators.
 
    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.

We have been the only network seriously reporting on the Oil-for-Food program, where a corrupt U.N. appears to have paid for anti-Americanism all over the world.

    "The government wants to kill all African people," said one witness to the ongoing massacres in Sudan, where the army, allied with local Arab militias, continues to wipe out black villages, as well as burn, rape and loot with scarcely a finger lifted by the international community.
 
    Last month, we called on the United Nations to act. This is not an internal conflict, as the U.N. might clam -- 100,000 refugees have fled across the border into Chad, part of 1 million made homeless in Western Sudan.
 
    And the U.N. has acted, in its own unique way. A few days ago it elected Sudan to another term on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, just the kind of gross insult added to injury we have come to expect from that body.
 
    Complaints from the United States -- whose delegation walked out before the vote -- were brushed off by the Sudanese representatives, with a logic that is sadly common in the Third World, equating the offenses of a handful of U.S. soldiers in an Iraqi prison to the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese by their own government.

    Sudan borders Egypt, yet the Arab world ignores that thousands of black Muslims are being killed, their homes and mosques burnt.
 
    We should not ignore it. The international community has a shameful record in Africa. Half a million Rwandans were killed 10 years ago, and nothing was done. We missed that chance to do the human thing; now we are missing another chance. Africans are being murdered in Africa for being black. "They killed everything black," said another witness. "Guns or no guns, cattle or no cattle. This is the program: They don't want African tribes in this place." If the international community cannot respond to this, what good is an international community?

    I doff my hat, briefly, to President Bush.
 
    Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe -- although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan's north and south after two million deaths.
 
    I've obtained a report by a U.N. interagency team documenting conditions at a concentration camp in the town of Kailek: Eighty percent of the children are malnourished, there are no toilets, and girls are taken away each night by the guards to be raped. As inmates starve, food aid is diverted by guards to feed their camels.
 
    The standard threshold for an "emergency" is one death per 10,000 people per day, but people in Kailek are dying at a staggering 41 per 10,000 per day -- and for children under 5, the rate is 147 per 10,000 per day.

"Children suffering from malnutrition, diarrhea, dehydration and other symptoms of the conditions under which they are being held live in filth, directly exposed to the sun," the report says.
 
    "The team members, all of whom are experienced experts in humanitarian affairs, were visibly shaken," the report declares. It describes "a strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation being enforced by the GoS [government of Sudan] and its security forces on the ground."
 
    Yet while Mr. Bush has done far too little, he has at least issued a written statement, sent aides to speak forcefully at the U.N. and raised the matter with Sudan's leaders. That's more than the Europeans or the U.N. has done. Where are Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac? Where are African leaders, like Nelson Mandela? Why isn't John Kerry speaking out forcefully? And why are ordinary Americans silent?

   There was that splendidly legitimate U.N. operation in Bosnia, where its blue-helmeted peacekeepers watched with indifference as Serbian soldiers rounded up for slaughter thousands of Muslim men in the so-called U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. Or Rwanda in 1994, where Mr. Annan -- then head of the U.N. peacekeeping office -- shrugged off panicked warning calls from the U.N. commander on the ground, thereby allowing the slaughter of 800,000.

   The Secretary-General's latest posturing is far from harmless. The U.N. has been given the lead role in organizing the elections in Iraq scheduled for January. But Mr. Annan's "illegal" comments, which have been replayed across the Arab world, have given an added feeling of legitimacy to every jihadist hoping to disrupt the vote.

"I do not recall any vote in the Security Council, ...that we had been behaving illegally in Iraq. Nor does Mr. Annan mention any U.N. vote, or any other authority, for his statement to the BBC that, from the "from our point of view and from the [U.N.] Charter point of view, [U.S. action] was illegal."

    The Taliban and Saddam Hussein were once the United Nations' twin embarrassments, rogue regimes that thumbed their noses at weak U.N. protestations, slaughtered their own, invaded their neighbors, and turned their outlands into terrorists sanctuaries. Now they are gone, despite either U.N. indifference or veritable opposition to their removal.
 
    First, the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization, the old perpetual force for good that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes.

    Second, urging democratic reforms in Palestine, is antithetical to the very stuff of the U.N., an embarrassing reminder that nearly half of its resolutions in the past half-century have been aimed at punishing tiny democratic Israel at the behest of its larger, more populous-and dictatorial-Arab neighbors.
 
    Third, the present secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is himself a symbol of all that is wrong with the U.N. A multibillion dollar oil-for-food fraud, replete with kickbacks (perhaps involving a company that his own son worked for), grew unchecked on his watch.

    Americans tend to be baffled by these reactions. They look at the multiplying scandals around the U.N. and wonder how the man in charge can avoid being held responsible for any of it by other countries.
 
    But the explanation is simple: Annan is the symbol of the U.N.'s lack of accountability. He is never held responsible for what goes wrong because the U.N. is never held responsible either. It sails in a cloud of noble idealism over the actual failures, hypocrisy, corruption and outright criminality that attend some U.N. actions on the ground below.

    n 2003 and 2004, the Israel Defense Forces captured documentation showing how the U.N. Development Program was regularly funding two Hamas front organizations: the Tulkarm Charity Committee and the Jenin District Committee for Charitable Funds.

"The extent of the corruption is staggering,'' Sen. Norm Coleman told me.

Coleman said this week's hearings will show that ''the scope of the ripoff'' at the U.N. is substantially more than the widely reported $10 billion to $11 billion in graft. *

''In seeing what is happening at the U.N.,'' Coleman told me, ''I am more troubled today than ever. I see a sinkhole of corruption.''

    Last week Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who chairs a Senate subcommittee probing Oil-for-Food, urged Annan to resign. "[A]s long as Mr. Annan remains in charge," he wrote, "the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under- the-table payments that took place under the UN's collective nose."
 
    Coleman succinctly summarized one infuriating effect of the UN's refusal to crack down on those crimes: "Since it was never likely that the UN Security Council, some of whose permanent members were awash in Saddam's favors, would ever call for Saddam's removal, the U.S. and its coalition partners were forced to put troops in harm's way to oust him by force. Today, money swindled from Oil-for-Food may be funding the insurgency against our troops and other terrorist activities against U.S. interests. Simply put, our troops would probably not have been placed in such danger if the UN had done its job in administering sanctions and Oil-for-Food."

    A debate currently rages about whether Kofi Annan enjoys the moral authority to lead the United Nations because the Oil for Food scandal happened under his command. That debate is 10 years too late and addresses the wrong subject. The salient indictment of Mr. Annan's leadership is lethal cowardice, not corruption; the evidence is genocide, not oil.
 
    Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the U.N.'s force commander in Rwanda, sent Mr. Annan a series of desperate faxes including one warning that Hutu militias "could kill up to 1,000" Tutsis "in 20 minutes" and others pleading for authority to protect vulnerable civilians. But at the crucial moment, Mr. Annan ordered his general to stand down and to vigorously protect, not genocide victims, assembled in their numbers waiting to die, but the U.N.'s image of "impartiality."
 
    The outline of this story is well known, but its most important detail is not: Tutsis often gathered in compounds (large church complexes, schools and even stadiums) where they had assumed they would be safe based on implicit, and sometimes explicit, promises of protection by Blue Helmeted peacekeepers. The U.N.'s withdrawal was, therefore, not a passive failure to protect but an active, and lethal, perfidy.
 
    Ten years ago, thousands of Muslim civilians concentrated here seeking shelter at a U.N. base. But Serb militias separated the men and boys from their women and put them on buses. Armed Blue Helmeted U.N. Peacekeepers -- tasked under Mr. Annan's leadership to protect Srebrenica's civilians in this U.N.-declared "Safe Area" -- watched passively. The women of Srebrenica never saw their men again.
 
Mr. Cain served in U.N. peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia.

    In a broader sense, however, what Mr. Volcker's report reveals is an "adverse finding" against the Secretary General: That is, patterns of willful neglect, conflict of interest and incompetence that would have any business CEO out on his ear.
 
    What we have summarized here provides merely a taste of the full report, which can be found at the Volcker Committee's Web site: www.iic-offp.org. Anyone who still thinks Mr. Annan has been acquitted of "wrongdoing" would do well to read it, as would anyone who still believes Mr. Annan is fit to lead the United Nations.

     He (Hussein) exploited the program, along with other cheating on the international sanctions levied against him, to buy important friendships. Hussein curried those friendships in 66 countries, but his pals were heavily clustered in nations such as France, Russia and China--countries that refused to demand that he be forced to obey UN resolutions in ways that could have prevented a war.
 

    The Hudson Institute's lively "Eye On The U.N." Web site had an interesting photograph of how the "international community" marked Nov. 29 -- the annual "International Day Of Solidarity With The Palestinian People." Kofi Annan and other bigwigs sat on a platform with a map flanked by the "Palestinian" and U.N. flags. The map showed Palestine but no Israel.