Oil-for-food report urges reforms at UN

"One more time, the secretary-general is out to lunch. He doesn't seem to understand the process," says Edward Luck, a longtime UN expert at Columbia University in New York. Noting that it was Annan who "loaded up" the reform process with a long list of issues unrelated to the management problem, Mr. Luck says, "There are real questions about whether or not he remains in office."

But the report has criticism for others, too. It cites past UN officials and Security Council members, including Russia and France, for allowing conditions that permitted corruption to deepen over the program's seven-year life span.

While critical of those directly involved in corruption, the report does not let the United States off the hook. It faults the US for overlooking the smuggling of Iraqi oil into Iraq's neighboring countries, including Jordan.

Still, the report does not link Annan to a contract awarded to a Swiss company that employed his son Kojo - one of the key unanswered elements that critics have been watching.

The inquiry has also yielded positive findings. It concludes that the oil-for-food program largely achieved its two goals: to feed the Iraqi people with Iraq's own oil money and to prevent Mr. Hussein from rebuilding a military that could threaten the region.

"The fact is that the US government and others were well aware the program had these weaknesses, yet [they] retained it because it continued to serve its basic purpose," says James Dobbins, an international security expert at the RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va., who has served in both the Bush and Clinton administrations.

Mr. Dobbins says there is "definitely room for improvement in UN management." But he also says that the virulent American criticism of the UN incited by the oil-for-food problems overlooks the fact that neither US nor UN money was lost in the fraud.

"It's important we remember it was all Iraqi money," Dobbins says. He also maintains that the extent of fraud and corruption was relatively limited, given the mammoth size of the program.

Still, some members of Congress have already called on Annan to resign. And the House of Representatives has voted to cut US funding for the UN in half if certain management reforms are not accomplished.

The Bush administration has not favored either Annan's resignation or the funding cut, but most analysts see US pressure on the UN rising - with uncertain consequences for the international institution. The UN requires US leadership in order to function, experts say, but at the same time, America's traditional disregard of the organization may doom its ability to reform.

As for such reforms, Mr. Muravchek of the American Enterprise Institute doubts that the creation of a chief operating officer position, for example, would have much impact. "We've seen that kind of thing before," he says, citing the creation - at US insistence - of an assistant secretary-general for management in the 1990s.

That didn't solve the problem, he says, arguing, "I don't see why this new position would."

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