I’m going to be bitter tonight. Maybe tomorrow. So much for the Appalachians, instead I’m going to pleasant summer school for three credits of arts/humanities. Arts/humanities. Yes. “Is Van Gogh expressing deterministic views of society in this painting? What? Oh, he just wanted to make a cool watercolor. Well, dang it, what am I wasting my time here for, YOU B^&$*#(@!!!!!”
In closing, I’m going to pull a Howard Dean.
“YEEEAAAAAARGH!!!”
At Healing Iraq Zeyad has come up with a list of oil bribes undertaken by Saddam’s administration in Iraq. (Originally published in an Iraqi newspaper.)
These shady deals were all done under the auspices of the UN and the Oil for Food program. The bribes add up to a total of 3.3 billion barrels of Iraqi crude oil (worth over 70 billion dollars). Here is the translated list. And here the original in Arabic.
Now you know why Iraqis suffered from the UN sanctions. Now you know why hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children had to die during the last ten years. Now you know why those people were vehemently anti-war.
I would like to assert that the economic and humanitarian problems in Iraq are certainly related, and the U.S.’s reasons for going to Iraq include both of these. Saddam wanted his way, the money was spent, but not in accordance with the program’s supposed rules. WMD’s are another discussion, but there were plenty of humanitarian reasons. International law would play a part, but these violations were unenforced by the UN. The bribes were reason enough for France and Russia to not complain. Just look at the list. They got mad flo. (Russia received 1.366 billion barrels!)
Update: Russian total corrected. After thinking about it, the mistake is probably due to the use of commas in numbers to signify the decimal point in other parts of the world instead of the “.” we typically use in America.