Saddam’s Enablers
One of the biggest financial scandals of modern times just keeps getting bigger. Now we hear from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman, that two European politicians, Britain’s George Galloway and France’s Charles Pasqua, together received allocations of over 30 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein under the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program. The two men, both vocal supporters of Saddam and opponents of the U.N. sanctions regime, are accused in the subcommittee’s report of participating in what Iraqi officials called the “Saddam Bribery System.” In exchange for their continued friendship, the report says, the two were among the select few granted quantities of Iraqi oil, which they could then turn around and sell for a profit. They allegedly attempted to cover up their activities by using third parties: in Pasqua’s case, the Swiss company Genmar; in Galloway’s, a charity he had set up to help a four-year-old girl suffering from leukemia. 
The allegations in the report derive from careful research into previously unpublished Iraqi oil-ministry documents as well as from interviews with Hussein regime officials, and they could be devastating. Galloway and Pasqua both recently won elections to their national legislatures. Pasqua, a close friend and ally of Jacques Chirac, could go to prison; his former foreign-policy adviser and authorized representative in the oil exchanges, Bernard Guillet was arrested last month as part of a government investigation into Oil-for-Food. Should there be a parliamentary inquiry in France, Chirac could be in serious trouble. Meanwhile, Galloway has promised to testify in a subcommittee hearing in Washington next week (expect more scandalous revelations to come, and not just about these two men). It’s to be hoped that the British government will launch an investigation into the charges, and into the Oil-for-Food scandal generally.
The greatest lesson of this is how significant a role corrupt Westerners had in boosting Saddam’s regime. Not only did they provide the dictator with needed cash, but they played right into his scheme of using oil allocations to buy favor around the globe. Had they not done so, Iraq’s fate might have been quite different. At least, millions of Iraqis might have been better off, sooner.—
The Editors