Feb. 20 - Mark Steyn's regular column in The Western Standard was on Canada's least-known person, Paul Desmarais:

... there has indeed been a Canadian making a difference in the world-and if The National wanted to do a 133-part special report on him, for once they’d have enough material. Most of us know Paul Desmarais as the . . . [those ellipses in original] well, let’s hold it there: most Canadians don’t know Paul Desmarais at all. You could stop the first thousand people walking down Yonge Street and I’ll bet no one would know who he is. But the few who do know him know him as the kingmaker behind Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin. Jean Chrétien’s daughter is married to Paul Desmarais’s son. Paul Martin was an employee of M. Desmarais’s Power Corp., and his Canada Steamship Lines was originally a subsidiary of Power Corp. that M. Desmarais put Mr. Martin in charge of. In other words, Paul Martin’s public identity--successful self-made businessman, not just a career pol, knows how to meet payroll, etc.--is entirely derived from the patronage of M. Desmarais.

Imagine if Jenna Bush married the chairman of HalliburtonÂ’s son, and then George W. Bush was succeeded by a president whoÂ’d been an employee of Halliburton: Michael MooreÂ’s next documentary would be buried under wall-to-wall Oscars and Palmes dÂ’Or. But M. Desmarais has managed to turn Ottawa into a company town without anyone being aware of the company. .. Power Corp.Â’s other alumni range from Quebec premiers to CanadaÂ’s most prominent international diplomat, Maurice Strong. In fairness, you donÂ’t have to work for M. Desmarais to reach the top of the greasy pole-Kim Campbell managed it, for about a week and a half.

we’re in the middle of the UN Oil-for-Fraud investigation, the all-time biggest scam, bigger than Enron and Worldcom and all the rest added together. And whaddaya know? The bank that handled all the money from the program turns out to be BNP Paribas, which tends to get designated by Associated Press and co. as a “French bank” but is, as it happens, controlled by one of M. Desmarais’s holding companies. That alone should cause even the droopiest bloodhound to pick up a scent: the UN’s banker for its Iraqi “humanitarian” program turns out to be (to all intents) Saddam’s favourite oilman.

On a (relatively) lighter note, as the President begins his European tour, Mark Steyn asks and answers the burning question of the day: What's US policy on Europe? No giggling.

What does all this mean? Nothing. In victory, magnanimity – and right now Bush can afford to be magnanimous, even if Europe isn't yet ready to acknowledge his victory. On Thursday, in a discussion of "the greater Middle East", the President remarked that Syria was "out of step". And, amazingly, he's right. Not so long ago, Syria was perfectly in step with the Middle East – it was the archetypal squalid stable Arab dictatorship. Two years on, Syria hasn't changed, but Iraq has, and, to varying degrees, the momentum in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon (where the Syrians have overplayed their hand) is also in the Bush direction. Boy Assad finds himself in the position of the unfortunate soldier in Irving Berlin's First World War marching song, "They Were All Out Of Step But Jim".

The EU isn't the Arab League, though for much of the past three years it's been hard to tell the difference. But it, too, is out of step. The question is whether the Europeans are smart enough, like the savvier Sunnis in Iraq, to realise it. The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt compared the President's inaugural speech with Gerhard Schröder's keynote address to the Munich Conference on Security Policy last week and observed that, while both men talked about the Middle East, terrorism and 21st-century security threats, Mr Bush used the word "freedom" 27 times while Herr Schröder uttered it not once; he preferred to emphasise, as if it were still March 2003 and he were Arab League Secretary-General, "stability" – the old realpolitik fetish the Administration has explicitly disavowed. It's not just that the two sides aren't speaking the same language, but that the key phrases of Mr Bush's vocabulary don't seem to exist in Chirac's or Schröder's.

By the Way, SteynOnline is off it's brief (?!) hiatus and open for your one-stop Steyn reading spot.

Feb. 23 - Austin Bay disagrees with Mark Steyn on the death of the West:

Steyn’s “bleakest last sentence” (to quote Roger Simon) is way too fin d’siecle. Steyn writes: “This week we’re toasting the end of an idea: the death of “the West".” Try and tell that to Ukraine and Poland– and for that matter, Denmark. Post- Theo van Gogh Holland may also object.

Feb. 28 - Mark Steyn responds to Austin Bay here (scroll down.) Very worthwhile read.

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Feb. 3 - Report Rips Management of Oil-for-Food and Kofi Annan has ordered disciplinary action (even though Sevan has already retired.) There is the possibility of legal action but in what court? The main victims are the Iraqi people but I doubt they'd be allowed to try him.

A partial transcript of Mr. Volcker's report to the Independent Inquiry Committee is here during which he explains what the report covers and what it does not.

The report (.pdf) is available here and here but I haven't been able to bring either site up up (it's probably deluged with visitors.)

Later.

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Feb. 3 - I hope last night's State of the Union Address doesn't distract too much attention from the release of the interim Volcker Report scheduled for 3 p.m. today. One preview is in Judith Miller's report in the New York Times, Inquiry Faults U.N.'s Oil-for-Aid Program. Unfortunately, the interim report is to be printed in the Wall Street Journal and thus is behind a paid subscription wall.

I don't know how accurate the Miller piece is and prefer to wait until the interim report itself is more widely available before accepting paraphrases over statements contained in the report itself, but the consensus from different sources seems to be that the U.N. is guilty of gross mismanagement, allowing conflicts of interest and failing to meet its own guidelines in awarding oil contracts.

(At one point Miller calls the report an "essay," which is a red flag for me and why I'm not too comfortable with her analysis.)

The best coverage will in all likelihood be by the vigilant people at Friends of Saddam who were (naturally) on top of the story early this morning.

Some links for those who want to brush up on fairly recent developments in UNSCAM including questions about Volcker's possible conflict-of-interest centering on his connections with PowerCorp, Paribas and Total and revelations about Kojo Annan's role in the investigation:

Volcker's Business Ties Raise Questions;

U.N didn't ask Volcker to disclose his financial ties and this opinion piece from the New York Post on that conflict;

Samir Vincent's testimony points to second UN official;

Paul Volcker search results from Telegraph for the very curious (why the Telegraph? because they were on top of this story from the beginning and are more accessible than the WSJ);

From the Sunday Times: Kojo Annan admits oil dealing. (Link from Norman's Spectator

From Fox: Oil-for-Food Probe Includes Annan's Son (Fox also has links to the Duelfer Report (in .pdf format) on that page);

Lastly, something that I think ties in with general questions about what constitutes a conflict of interest and full disclosure in the media as well as the public sphere, a transcript of a syposium on Bloggers, journalists and citing conflicts of interest which I feel by inference rebuts the argument that it was okay for Paul Volcker not to cite his conflict of interest because Annan didn't ask him to do so.

One caution: the investigation has reportedly not uncovered any evidence that U.N. officials actually accepted bribes, but getting requested documents remains difficult and whoever originally pointed out that this could far eclipse Enron has been proven prophetic.

I have the same question now as I had when this story first broke in 2003:

For what purpose, exactly, was the 2.2% administration fee levied by the U.N. on the Oil-for-Food Program?

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