Business and the Beast

Forget the fact that the sanctions against Iraq were overseen by the US and UK who had a veto on every single thing imported into Iraq and who turned a blind eye to smuggling and sanctions rorting so long as it benefitted their friends. Ignore the widespread suffering they caused in Iraq and how utterly ineffective they were on Saddam.

Isn't it precious that the company that accounted for 14% of all kickbacks to Saddam under the oil for food program is our very own Australian Wheat Board. Of course this probably doesn't account for US companies, but alas, most information concerning them is classified. I wonder why? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that American companies (the mob that wanted the sanctions) were responsible for 52% of kickbacks to Saddam. Anyway right up until the first Australian bomb fell on Iraq an Australian company, one of our biggest exporters, intimately connected with the government, was greasing Saddam's palm. Even as John Howard hopped around like a Punch & Judy puppet, decrying Saddam as an evil the world had never seen, his friends in the corporate sector were handing out money to Saddam Hussein like Shane Warne in a strip club.

In fact the head of the AWB at the time did such a good job of funnelling baksheesh to Saddam that Alexander Downer, Lord of Baghdad, appointed him to a team meant to 'modernise' Iraqi agriculture, nudge nudge, wink wink. Something tells me that the 'problems' regarding wheat imports into Iraq we had recently were just about who got paid and how much. Obviously we just don't have as much clout as we used to.