[Mb-civic] Mainstream media reports on UN "scandal" and on Falluja

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6d719b52-459a-11d9-8fcf-00000e2511c8.html

Destroying the UN
Published: December 4 2004 02:00  London Financial Times

The witch-hunt against Kofi Annan and the United Nations over the Iraq
oil-for-food scandal is, quite simply, a scandal all on its own. The
leaders of this lynch mob in the US Congress and the rightwing
commentariat are not gunning for Mr Annan so much as aiming to destroy the
UN as an institution. That would be a disaster - for all of us, including,
especially, the US.


It is hard to know whether those conducting this campaign are being
deliberately mendacious, or whether they cannot add up or understand which
bits of what institutions policed the sanctions against Saddam Hussein.

True, the oil-for-food regime presented genuine moral dilemmas about
unpleasant policy alternatives in dealing with the Iraqi dictatorship.
Furthermore, any sanctions policy against any country offers rich pickings
to those with the skills to circumvent it. But let us look at the facts.

First, the oil-for-food policy was devised and run by the member states of
the UN Security Council, not by the UN Secretariat. All of the roughly
36,000 contracts were approved by a Security Council committee dominated
by the US and the UK. Of these, about 5,000 were held up. But objections
were entirely about imports to Iraq that might have offered Baghdad
dual-use technology with which to reconstitute its weapons programmes.
There was not one objection about oil-pricing scams, although UN officials
brought these to the attention of the committee on no fewer than 70
occasions.

Second, the "headline" figure touted by a Senate sub-committee of a $21bn
(£11bn) leakage from the scheme - transmogrified by editorialists into "US
taxpayers' dollars" - is fantasy, albeit a damaging one. This covers
smuggled oil and, even though oil-for-food only started in 1996, Iraqi
shipments to Jordan and Turkey from 1991 sanctioned by waivers voted by
Congress.

Forgotten in this intellectually dishonest campaign is the fact that
sanctions worked: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. And that
oil-for-food mitigated their effect on the Iraqi people: malnutrition was
halved, whereas since last year's invasion of Iraq it has almost doubled.

If the independent inquiry headed by Paul Volcker, the former Federal
Reserve chairman, finds any UN official complicit in Iraq's roughly $4.4bn
oil price skimming, then that person should have his diplomatic immunity
lifted and be prosecuted. But there is nothing here to be laid at the door
of Mr Annan, even though the lobbying activities of his son Kojo, who was
still receiving severance payments from a company seeking Iraq's trade
after oil-for-food started, will have hurt him.

President George W. Bush should also reflect on just how much the US needs
the UN, not just in Iraq but in dealing with potential crises such as
Iran, and on just how much more dysfunctional the world could become if
the UN went the way of the League of Nations between the two world wars.
We know that that way lies chaos.

--

The New York Times - Dec 1, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/international/middleeast/01reconstruct.h
tml

In Falluja's Ruins, Big Plans and a Risk of Chaos

by Robert F. Worth

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 27 - Standing in the rubble outside an empty medical
clinic here, Dr. Basam Mohamed, dressed in a blue blazer and work boots,
gazed out at the ruins of his native city. He had just heard a group of
American civil affairs officers explain their plans to rebuild the clinic
and install a huge water tank behind it until the water pipes - smashed by
bombs - could be fixed.

But Dr. Mohamed, a Health Ministry official in the Iraqi interim
government, had other worries. His parents are among the residents who
fled Falluja just before the American military offensive here earlier this
month, he said. They are eager to return but have no idea how badly the
fighting damaged the city.

"They will feel hard toward the Americans," Dr. Mohamed said with a
wince, as his American guides led him off to look at another ruined
clinic.

As military officials here prepare to start letting the first residents
return to Falluja, possibly as soon as mid-December, they face an unusual
challenge: how to win back the confidence of the people whose city they
have just destroyed. Their task will be made harder by the need to deter
returning insurgents, who will try to sabotage the reconstruction with
attacks, commanders say.

American officials say they cannot afford to let this former insurgent
bastion become a microcosm of the broader struggle in Iraq - a rapid
military victory followed by a lapse into violence and chaos.

Yet even some American officers here are skeptical about their ability to
bring back safely more than a small number of residents in time for the
national and provincial elections in January - a central goal of the
offensive. Fighting goes on in the city's southern neighborhoods, where
small groups of guerrillas are still holding out. American troops have
found an unexpectedly large number of weapons storehouses, commanders 
say,
and the need to dispose of them safely has delayed rebuilding efforts in
those areas.

The full extent of the damage inflicted by American bombs, tanks and
artillery is only now becoming apparent. The number of buildings
destroyed in the fighting is far higher than 200, the figure released last
week by the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, engineers and commanders
say. The city's power lines are so badly damaged that in most of the city,
they will have to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch - a project that
will take six months to a year, American engineers say. Damage to the
city's water and sewer pipes, already badly corroded before the invasion,
is milder but will also take months to repair.

The coordination of all this work will be hard enough, with the
Americans saying they will pour in money and expertise but will cede
major decisions to the Iraqi interim government. American planners also
say it is essential that much of the actual rebuilding work be given to
Iraqi contractors but acknowledge that those contractors will be subject
to intimidation and that qualified Iraqi engineers may be hard to find.
Just last week, as water from broken pipes created chest-deep floods in
Falluja's streets, American officers had trouble persuading any of the
Iraqi engineers who knew where the valves were located to venture into the
city and help shut them off.

The role of the city's roughly 250,000 residents, now mostly scattered in
other towns throughout the region, may be the most crucial and
unpredictable part. It is still far from clear how the military will
communicate its neat plan to repopulate the city sector by sector, or how
the returnees will react once they arrive. Falluja, where resistance to
the American occupation ran high, has a long history as a rebellious city.

American officials say they fully understand the risks, and have been
planning for them since last spring. Already, American civil affairs teams
have begun making condolence payments to residents who were injured or had
their houses destroyed in the attack, up to a maximum of $2,500 per
person. The interim Iraqi government has also promised $100 to each
returning family.

The American plan here involves a carefully phased renewal. The city
will be opened to residents sequentially, starting in the north and
moving southward as basic services are restored to 16 separate areas
designated by American military planners, said Col. John R. Ballard, the
commander of the Marine Fourth Civil Affairs Group, based in Washington.
Generators will supply power, and water tanks placed along the city's main
boulevards will provide water, at least for the moment.

To prevent looting, the head of every household will be asked to wear an
identification badge, Colonel Ballard said, and American and Iraqi troops
will be given special rules of engagement to deal with theft. No cars will
be allowed in the city at first, to prevent car bombs. Instead, a bus
system will provide free transportation.

Within two or three months, Marine officials say, bigger projects will be
set in motion: a new $35 million wastewater treatment plant, four new
school buildings, several new health clinics. Badly damaged homes will be
bulldozed and rebuilt, or owners will be compensated. To help revive the
city's economy, the Marines will ask all returning residents with relevant
skills to take a job in the reconstruction projects.

In short, the Marines envision a huge effort of social and physical
engineering, all intended to transform a bastion of militant
anti-Americanism into a benevolent and functional metropolis. There are
even plans to build new housing projects on the city's outskirts while the
central areas are being rebuilt.

"The best place to bring a model town into place is Falluja," Colonel
Ballard said. But if similar rebuilding efforts in Najaf and elsewhere are
any guide, the project under way here - far more ambitious than anything
yet tried in this country - will be more expensive and time-consuming than
its planners think.

Reconstruction projects undertaken in Najaf since the fighting there in
August, for instance, have been plagued by corruption, overpayment and
shoddy work, relief officials said. After an American corporation there
began rebuilding a wastewater treatment plant, they found a lack of local
people with the training to operate it, said Lt. Cmdr. Michael Woltz, a
member of the team of Navy Seabees helping rebuild Falluja.

In Falluja, too, there are questions about how many Iraqi engineers are
available to help figure out the city's antiquated infrastructure.

"Before the battle, Iraqi engineers were not willing to talk to us, and I
have not been able to get a good list yet," said Lt. Col. Leonard J.
DeFrancisi, a Marine civil affairs officer. "I'm confident that when we
put the call out we will find good people to help run the city."

All these plans, military officials say, are predicated on Iraqi
security forces successfully keeping insurgents out and preventing
violence. If they fail, as they did in April, the whole project could
unravel.

American and Iraqi forces will provide security for all the
reconstruction projects, at least initially, Colonel Ballard said. They
will also form a cordon around the city, screening anyone who enters and
checking for weapons.

While some Iraqi companies have already been taken on, none wanted
their names disclosed because of security concerns. Officials would not
comment on whether any American contractors had been hired.

So far, it is far from clear that the Americans can keep insurgents out of
the city. Some appear to be living there now, relying on the Americans for
emergency food and water during the day and attacking them by night,
according to both American commanders and Iraqis living in the area. All
of them are young men, some with suspicious wounds, and all have the same
story: they stayed in the city to protect their family's property. Some
even wear the distinctive black clothes and tennis shoes favored by the
insurgents.

Nor is it clear that the city's residents will favor the Americans over
their enemies. Last week, Hamid Humood, a 38-year-old cigarette seller who
had stayed in the city during the battle, was one of those seeking
American food and water at the Hadra mosque.

"They are all liars, the government and the Americans," Mr. Humood said.
"The mujahedeen didn't hurt us. They helped us."

Others are friendlier to the American presence. But most are waiting in
small towns or rural areas outside the city, and they are growing
impatient. Just east of Falluja, several hundred exiled residents are now
living on the grounds of a cement plant. During a visit there on a day
when the temperature was just above 40 degrees, many displaced residents
were dressed in light summer clothing and complaining they had no blankets
and had left their winter clothing in Falluja. Americans who brought them
emergency food and water could only apologize and explain that they had no
blankets.

"They need help," said Dr. Mohamed, the Health Ministry official whose own
parents are waiting to return, speaking of Falluja's scattered residents.
"They are suffering. But when they return, they will suffer even more."

[Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article.]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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