"Morality Play" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Morality Play

Kofi Annan has announced that there will be some disciplinary measures taken against the United Nations officials who were running the oil-for-food program in Iraq. The plan was to allow oil-rich Iraq to sell some petroleum, enough to buy food and medicine for their starving and sick people. It amounted to tens of billions of dollars. Paul Volcker’s investigation turned up significant, questionable pocketing of money by the people running the program, people who are still at the United Nations.

It would be nice to think that the UNers are above that sort of behavior, but they are very much not so. Indeed, their criminality, abetted by Annan’s stingy sense of discipline, is what gives the American right all the ammunition it needs to discredit the world body, which gives the UN none of the standing it needs to be used to replace the U.S. as the world’s policeman and to put an end to the insanity of war on our dear blue planet.

But who are we, the United States of America, to criticize the world body? After all, our Senate just confirmed Alberto Gonzalez to be the top dog at our Department of Justice. Signing off on Gonzalez, a former Texas judge who took huge financial contributions from companies who had issues before his bench, were a number of Democrats. One can sorta understand that Republicans think party loyalty is more important than voting for a man who twisted international law to justify Americans committing torture, but what happened to the notion of two parties, one of them loyal to the country but in opposition to its defamation.

And then there’s military chief Donald Rumsfeld who said he offered to resign twice but wasn’t taken up on his offer. Why should he have been? The White House, that is Premier Cheney, thinks he and his have been doing a great job. That military esprit de corps is just mahvelous, dahling. And consider the senior U.S. Marine Corps general who said it was "fun to shoot some people." The comments, from a major figure in Afghanistan and Iraq, caused some eyebrows to arch but who could fault him from telling the popular truth. I mean, they ain’t in it for the parades.

No wonder we talk about morality. There is none.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.