AN ABJECT FAILURE BY MOST STANDARDS...

In its final years in power, Saddam Hussein's government systematically extracted billions of dollars in kickbacks from companies doing business with Iraq, funneling most of the illicit funds through a network of foreign bank accounts in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Millions of Iraqis were struggling to survive on rations of food and medicine. Yet the government's hidden slush funds were being fed by suppliers and oil traders from around the world who sometimes lugged suitcases full of cash to ministry offices, said Iraqi officials who supervised the skimming operation...

Perhaps the best measure of the corruption comes from a review by the provisional Iraqi government, with U.N. help, of the $8.7 billion in outstanding oil-for-food contracts.

The review found that 70 percent of the suppliers had inflated their prices and agreed to pay a 10 percent kickback, in cash or by transfer to accounts in Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian banks.

At that rate, Iraq would have collected as much as $2.3 billion out of the $32.6 billion worth of contracts it signed since mid-2000, when the kickback system began...

U.N. overseers say they were unaware of the systematic skimming of oil-for-food revenues. In any case, they add, they were focused on running aid programs.

...A PRAISEWORTHY EFFORT BY UN STANDARDS...

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has praised the Oil-for-Food Programme for accomplishing one of the largest, most complex and unusual tasks ever entrusted to the Secretariat.

In a statement to the Security Council (20 November 2003), he noted that the Programme, which closed on 21 November was the only humanitarian programme ever to have been funded entirely from resources belonging to the nation it was designed to help.

He said that in nearly seven years of operation, the Programme had been required to meet "an almost impossible series of challenges", using some $46 billion of Iraqi export earnings on behalf of the Iraqi people.

That is the same UN that Senator Kerry says ought to be in charge in Iraq...despite the fact they don't even have an office in Iraq...despite the fact that the UN Secretary General defines two billion dollars siphoned off by Saddam as a praiseworthy effort by the UN. Says Kerry:

We must offer the UN the lead role in assisting Iraq with the development of new political institutions

Sorry, Senator...my standards are higher than that.