The Financial Times' editorial bluntly calls Safire and co. liars, intellectually dishonest, and their campaign against Annan "a scandal".
But, of course, don't hold your breath for the 'liberal' NY Times, a key vehicle for this scandal, to have second thoughts about (and much less criticize!) its little freak-show of fanatic rightwing columnists.
Link to the Financial Times' editorial.
When even the British financial press is 'to the left' of the US's so-called-liberal newspapers, you know something in this country is rotten to the core.
Destroying the UN
The witch-hunt against Kofi Annan and the United Nations over the Iraq oil-for-food scandal is, quite simply, a scandal all on its own. The leaders of this lynch mob in the US Congress and the rightwing commentariat are not gunning for Mr Annan so much as aiming to destroy the UN as an institution. That would be a disaster - for all of us, including, especially, the US.
It is hard to know whether those conducting this campaign are being deliberately mendacious, or whether they cannot add up or understand which bits of what institutions policed the sanctions against Saddam Hussein.
(...)
First, the oil-for-food policy was devised and run by the member states of the UN Security Council, not by the UN Secretariat. All of the roughly 36,000 contracts were approved by a Security Council committee dominated by the US and the UK. (...) There was not one objection about oil-pricing scams, although UN officials brought these to the attention of the committee on no fewer than 70 occasions.
(...)
Forgotten in this intellectually dishonest campaign is the fact that sanctions worked: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. And that oil-for-food mitigated their effect on the Iraqi people: malnutrition was halved, whereas since last year's invasion of Iraq it has almost doubled.
(...)
Link to the full Financial Times editorial.
Addendum:
Thanks to cls180: I had missed today's
NY Times editorial.
It's obviously prompted by the embarrassment of yesterday's devastating Financial Times editorial -- and still written in a very wishy-washy tone, the intention seems to be just to provide minimal ass-cover.
Of course, no hint in it whatsoever that the NY Times has serious responsibilities in this scandalous witch-hunt (as the usually very polite and reasoned FT calls it), and no criticism concerning the truthfulness, intentions, and modus-operandi of their fanatic rightwing friends and freak-show columnists.