Norm Coleman attacks Kofi Annan

Find the snake in the image below:


Left to right: Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Norm Coleman

Here begins a four-part series on the rich history of corruption and secret dealings during the last twenty-five years of US involvement in the Iraq tragedy.

Part I: Norm Coleman
Part II: Oil-for-food in the media
Part III: Year zero in Spring 2003: Pentagon/CPA burns Iraq
Part IV: Iraqgate

A useful idiot
Republican US Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota is a useful idiot in the Bush Administration's war of contempt against the United Nations and international law.

Coleman is the perfect handmaiden. He is a smooth operator, but not so bright -- perfect qualities with which to serve Bush. His conscience is difficult to trouble as he easily abandoned his Democratic friends, including the late Senator Paul Wellstone and former Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey to become a Republican turncoat. He has a proven track record as a corporate shill, a gambler with large quantities of taxpayer money, and a protector of private interests from the prying eyes of the public. To top it off, he's pretty on camera.

See the Appendix on Coleman below for some choice references.

Still, being from blue-state Minnesota where "values" at times have been known to include honesty in government, he must prove his mettle and manhood as a Republican servant. Therefore, the junior senator has been tasked as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) in the United States Senate with the UN Oil-for-food investigation. A hearing on Oil-for-food was held on November 15. The author of the last null Iraq weapons report, Charles Duelfer, gave testimony. Audio with lousy video of this hearing, plus text of witness testimony, is available from a page at the site for the full Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

Note the participation of my own current senator, the Honorable Republican Puppy Dog Susan Collins. Collins is chairman of the larger committee of which Coleman's subcommittee is a part. She is better known in current news as the shepherd of the 911-inspired intelligence reform bill. Limits of her own mettle are showing while much more powerful military and anti-immigrant reactionaries have decided to stop her bill dead in its tracks.

Target: Annan
All the posturing on UN Oil-for-Food is a wedge to attack the legitimacy of the UN itself. The lurking issue is the illegality of the invasion of Iraq. The normally cowed-by-US-power-UN-Secretary-General Kofi Annan had been so challenged by the world's lesser countries –- while the Iraq-invading monster daily showed its true colors with its brutal occupation practices -- that he decided, 18 months late, to declare the war illegal.

Some impact was added by the timing of Annan's remarks because they were given in a BBC interview seven weeks prior to the US election. Annan probably had no chance of influencing any US voters, but the heresy was enough to send at the time a number of US mouthpieces into a vicious snit. Refer to the link for details.

So in Bushworld, punishment for Annan is in order. He therefore has been set upon by the scorpion Coleman. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal oped, Coleman puffed up with an air of indignity over the affair, primed his stinger, and demanded Annan resign. In the piece, Coleman suggests that there is no way that the UN's own investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker can be credible.

But that's not all. Coleman basically blames the UN for forcing the US to invade and putting its troops at risk over the corrupt objections of countries in the pocket of Saddam. It's a clever construct of the Bush principle of "you're with us or you're with the terrorists" -- one used repeatedly against the peace movement -- which paints anti-invasion/occupation sentiment as endorsement of Saddam and a laundry list of no good we were told he definitely was up to.

Of course it doesn't matter the list was false -- the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only the most glaring evidence of the lies. The propaganda line has evolved into some sort of bizarre precognitive, "pre-crime" scenario, and Coleman repeats this here -- there is certainty Saddam had in his mind a whole scheme for building some future arsenal and attacking all that is good and proper in the world, using the ill-gotten gains built up with the acquiescence of the UN.

Sure, Norm, just like there was in March 2003 "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised".

Here is part of Coleman's piece, with my emphasis added:

While many questions concerning Oil-for-Food remain unanswered, one conclusion has become abundantly clear: Kofi Annan should resign. The decision to call for his resignation does not come easily, but I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, as long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, 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 U.N.'s collective nose.

Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. for all but a few days of the Oil-for-Food program, and he must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.'s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam's abuses. The consequences of the U.N.'s ineptitude cannot be overstated: Saddam was empowered to withstand the sanctions regime, remain in power, and even rebuild his military. Needless to say, he made the Iraqi people suffer even more by importing substandard food and medicine under the Oil-for-Food program and pawning it off as first-rate humanitarian aid.

Since it was never likely that the U.N. 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 coalition troops in Iraq and other terrorist activities against U.S. interests. Simply put, the troops would probably not have been placed in such danger if the U.N. had done its job in administering sanctions and Oil-for-Food.

Another point must be made about the evidence against Annan on which Coleman apparently depends. Coleman admits that nothing implicates Annan directly, it's simply a "fish rots from the head" argument that he's making. However, there is a recent story about the involvement of Annan's son with a Swiss company that had been contracted to render certain services during the Oil-for-food program. This story in today's Observer has some breaking information. Coleman and company have latched onto "Kojo" as some kind of "gotcha".

Documents Coleman does cite allegedly show the corruption of other UN employees and international figures in oil voucher deals. These documents may have a highly questionable pedigree. Deep Blade Journal posted on this last April, explaining the involvement of suspected spy and forger Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi handled certain secret Iraqi archives after the invasion. The initial planting of the story followed Chalabi's work with these documents.

Recently, one of the alleged beneficiaries of Saddam's largesse has been vindicated by a court in the UK. Anti-war Member of Parliament George Galloway from Glasgow, who engaged in diplomatic missions in Iraq, was savagely libeled by the conservative Telegraph newspaper. He has now won a judgment against the newspaper for framing it's stories about Galloway with phrases like "In Saddam's pay'' and "Saddam's little helper'".

There is not likely to be a reprieve for Annan. Despite the fact that he has the confidence of a broad spectrum of UN supporters (for example from Timothy Wirth, the former senator in a debate with Norm Coleman during an interesting report on Friday's PBS News Hour), business will grind to a halt until the organization's dominant member is satisfied.

Personally, I believe the UN should release all information it has about the Iraq sanctions regime – and anyone culpable in corruption or destruction of the country should lose their jobs. What happened during this time was tragic, the product of UN complicity with US perfidy. I also argue that all this focus on Annan and just the Oil-for-food aspect of the sanctions misses the bigger picture.

Foremost, the sanctions destroyed the country with tenacious American insistence, while setting off slow wasting of the population. Death rates -- especially for children -- rose to levels tantamount to genocide. And post-invasion Iraq obviously is a sea of death.

On top of all that killing, post-invasion abuse of Iraq's finances by Pentagon authorities (under UN Security Council Resolution 1483) was redolent of corruption and misappropriation. (See links here, here, here, and here)

Likewise were secret US dealings with a friendly Saddam -- including missions by Donald Rumsfeld -- throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Should we so easily forget the "tilt towards Iraq" and the Iraqgate scandal? If Annan's head deserves to roll, absolutely, most certainly so should Donald Rumsfeld's.

Where is Coleman's bright light when it comes to investigating the rest of the story of the monstrous tragedy that is Iraq?

For additional insights and some excellent references on Oil-for-food, please see Rodger Payne's posting of November 9. Payne has links to articles by Professor Joy Gordon that are absolutely essential for understanding the workings and destructive force of the sanctions against Iraq during the period from 1990-2003.

Appendix on Coleman
Who is Norm Coleman? As I mentioned, he switched from Democrat to Republican. In late 1996 while mayor of St. Paul, he found backers for private development boosterism in Minnesota's capital were much more comfortable with a Republican.

The switch meshed perfectly with Coleman's political ambitions. But his first try for higher office was a bust, losing the governorship to Jesse Ventura in 1998 (he came in second, ahead of Democrat Skip Humphrey).

Fast forward to April 2001. At that time the current Minnesota governor, Republican Tim Pawlenty, was considering a run against Paul Wellstone in 2002. On April 18, 2001, Pawlenty was preparing to make an announcement that he would run for the Republican nomination to challenge Wellstone. He was stopped in his tracks by a phone call from – Dick Cheney. The Bush camp preferred Coleman as their handpicked candidate.

So it was. Then tragedy struck. Less than two weeks before the 2002 election Wellstone, his wife, their daughter, three staffers, and two pilots died in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota. Coleman became the beneficiary of the untimely death, as Wellstone was set to win that election by at least a five-point margin.

The best source for stories on what Coleman's boosterism has meant for St. Paul is the Twin Cities weekly, City Pages. Check out these stories:

October 2003: This Space for Rent
Lots of layoffs. Cheap leases. Empty offices. Welcome to downtown St. Paul.

"...it is generally agreed that the city's central business district is now experiencing its highest office vacancy rate ever, at about 30 percent--worse than the metro-wide vacancy rates (estimated at 19 percent this summer) or downtown Minneapolis (21 percent)..."

October 2002: Magical Misery Tour
Norm Coleman's "St. Paul miracle" gets a withering report card

St. Paul's citizens will be paying for Coleman's corporate charity well into the future. Between 1993 and 2000 the total indebtedness facing the city rose from $460 million to $619 million--more than this year's entire budget.

"You can't run a city like Norm Coleman did and expect that to be sustainable," says Dan McGrath, executive director of Progressive Minnesota. "Norm Coleman might be a wonderful mayor in great economic times, but look at the economic disaster he's left in St. Paul."

Coleman went to bat big-time for Lawson Software, a firm now struggling to keep its head above water after a protracted and continuing period of industry consolidation and layoffs. Coleman gambled $100 million of public money to build facilities for Lawson. The City of St. Paul sold the property to developer and Coleman campaign contributor David Frauenshuh for about 50-cents on the dollar. Frauenshuh made political contributions to Coleman totaling over $40,000 from 1998 to 2004, according to an April 2004 story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. What if these legal contributions had involved relief supplies for Iraq rather than politics? We'd be calling it "corruption", wouldn't we?

One more item related to the NHL hockey team Coleman spearheaded into Minnesota with public money:

January 2002: Trouble in Rivercentre
St. Paul built a new hockey arena for the Wild and a new convention center for the city. Guess which one is losing money?

My personal opinion, having lived six years in the same state as Norm Coleman and having watched his unfortunate rise to power, is that he is a snake. He has shown willingness to gamble away the public trust, do the bidding for powerful interests, and consume anything that is in his way, including UN officials and by extension international law that the UN represents. The bad misdirection of emphasis of Coleman's Oil-for-food investigation could cost the world more than the dubious gains made through the firing of allegedly corrupt officials.

Next: Oil-for-food in the media

Tuesday update: Go see my St. Paul friend David's post on Coleman. There is a good quote there from the StarTribune and some choice words from Twin Cities locals.