The oil-for-food rip off.

ITEM: Years after the United Nations oil-for-food scheme in Iraq became a huge embarrassment, the UN is still congratulating itself over the program, saying on its website: "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." Annan told the Security Council that the scheme "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.' "

CORRECTION: The UN oil-for-food program was no humanitarian success story. It was unadulterated, institutionalized fraud. The United Nations presided over, as one Wall Street Journal writer put it, "the biggest fraud in the history of relief," while collecting $1.4 billion in commissions. The scheme enriched Saddam Hussein's cronies, eroded sanctions, and helped the dictator rearm.

Only an easily duped UN apologist or someone with terminal self-delusion would buy into the design of the oil-for-food program--whereby the supposedly defeated dictator of Iraq earned profits by selling oil, which would be used to ease the suffering of the Iraqi populace, while permitting an embargo to be maintained. Saddam got to choose the customers. The results were predictable. Saddam sold oil below market value. The buyers resold those "allocations," at a large profit, to third parties--with payments kicked back to the dictator and his allies. The UN covered up the details of the transactions, making the fraud safe and easy.

Between 1997 and 2003, Kofi Annan's crew approved more than $100 billion in business for Saddam. The Iraqi dictatorship got more than $10 billion in illegal revenues from the UN-run program, as estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office. Saddam, meanwhile, was also smuggling additional oil out of Iraq through neighboring countries.

UN advocates would have people believe that this scandal was happening unbeknownst to Kofi Annam though people close to him profited enormously. His own son grew rich through a related UN contract given to the son's employer. Even the director of the oil-for-food program was implicated. Undersecretary-General Benon Sevan, an Annan protege, allegedly made about $1 million by selling 9.3 million barrels of oil allotted to him by Saddam. Sevan has been charged with steering contracts and receiving large amounts of monies for which he can't account. Until the practice was widely criticized, the UN had agreed to pay Sevan's legal expenses out of oil-for-food monies.

Reports from the investigating Volcker Commission noted the atrocious oversight by the world body, as well as kickbacks to the head of the program. While this probe found much wrongdoing, it essentially slapped Annan on the wrist for improper management--even though Annan's chief of staff began destroying thousands of documents, three years' worth of records, on the very day that the Security Council authorized the investigation. A chagrined Paul Volcker was eventually forced to admit that his probe had not exonerated Annan, as the secretary-general claimed.

The corruption was so widespread that the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations investigating the scandal detailed evidence that points to involvement of British Member of Parliament George Galloway; former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua; a former top aide to Russian President Putin, Alexander Voloshin; and a top Russian nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. And the United Nations brags about how well this oil-for-food program was run.

In light of the scope of the fraud that took place, many people are calling for a reform of the UN, reform that would involve giving the UN, and especially the head of the UN, Kofi Annan, more influence. Supposedly UN "reforms" can rid the world body of corruption and prevent a scandal such as the oil-for-food scheme from ever happening again. How so? The UN will hardly acknowledge its culpability and has sought some minor scapegoats in the oil-for-food scandal. And the "reforms," intended to strengthen the UN, will not make abuse less likely. Indeed, the UN's powers are the problem.

The British statesman Lord Acton warned: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Just imagine the temptations and opportunities for corruption if the global power elites are ever allowed to create a world government under the UN! Their new world order would possess neither the limitations of power nor the checks and balances among the branches of government that characterize our own constitutional system. In the hands of socialists and conspirators who would run the UN system, there is no question that the abuse would be widespread, that it would be on a scale far exceeding the oil-for-food rip off, and that freedom as well as dollars would be at stake.