Jack’s Apologia for Kofi hits hard

The Times is now trying to argue that it is all a tempest in a teapot because most of Saddam’s ill-gotten gains came via smuggling through Iraq’s neighbors, among them putative allies of the United States. But the oil-for-food scandal is not primarily about the lining of Saddam’s pockets — it’s about the manipulation of, and therefore the legitimacy of, Security Council decisions.

That’s just the beginning. You must read the rest.

While the NYT richly earned Jack’s fisking, and the Economist is asking, Oil-for-food: scheme or scam? (and quoting Koffi’s saying that his son’s less-than-full disclosure had created a “perception problem”), Kofi, as part of what looks to me like a full-time PR initiative, writes in the same issue of the Economist that world leaders must act on the recommendations of a new report on collective security. No need to guess who established the “High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change”. Nothing new from the report: all it proposes is “a collective response through the UN”. With Kofi in charge, of course.

No surprises here.