americans not happy...., page-2

I thought this little editorial in the Australian said it quite nicely...

The Iraqi bribes affair could cripple the Government

JOHN Howard says he did not know AWB was paying bribes to secure sales of wheat to Iraq. He says his ministers did not know either. And the same goes for officers of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. If it is established "in a proper legal sense" that AWB did pay bribes, Mr Howard says he will be very angry because "we frankly believed all along AWB was an organisation of complete integrity". So that's all right then. AWB was off on a frolic of its own, and the Government was gulled. No, it's not. The more AWB officers admit to Terence Cole's inquiry into the food-for-oil scandal, the more reason there is to wonder if the Government is gullible, duplicitous or worse. And whether ministers knew about this grubby business is perhaps the most important question the Prime Minister and his colleagues have faced in their decade in office. Australians fought Saddam Hussein's wretched regime twice in 15 years. Proof that the Government knew, or even suspected, AWB was paying off the dictator, but did nothing to stop the bribes, would be a betrayal of the men and women who risked their lives on active service. It is hard to conceive of circumstances in which any minister so implicated could survive.

Certainly there is no evidence yet any minister knew AWB was paying off people in Iraq. To date, all the admissions by AWB officers before Commissioner Cole's inquiry indicate this was a joke they kept from the politicians and their most senior staff. But evidence is emerging that if nobody knew, some people in Canberra should certainly have suspected something odd was going on in Iraq. Canberra was alerted on at least five occasions. And on Thursday, Commissioner Cole heard evidence that AWB officer Michael Young, on secondment to the occupation forces in Iraq from Australia – and therefore working for the Australian Government – was asked to assist in identifying money that Saddam Hussein's regime had skimmed from the oil-for-food contracts. Both he and an AWB colleague copied the request to a DFAT officer. This in itself hopelessly compromises DFAT, with Mr Long in a position to report, or keep quiet, about the payment of kickbacks to which he was party. But the official line is that it did not occur to anyone in DFAT to ask some hard questions about AWB's sales success in Iraq. A DFAT spokesman explained why on Thursday, saying the request from Baghdad did not specifically mention AWB in the context of the kickbacks. In any case, the officials had AWB's undertaking it did not pay bribes.

That the bureaucrats were naive at the time is manifest. But they are plain stupid if they think this explanation gets them off the hook. At best it seems they were desperate not to upset arrangements that had made Australian wheat farmers a great deal of money. Commissioner Cole's inquiry will probably discover if there is anything worse about their behaviour – he says he has ample power to investigate the role of public servants. None of this seems to alarm Mr Howard, but it should. As Caroline Overington demonstrates in this edition of The Weekend Australian, alarm bells over AWB's involvement with Iraq have been ringing since 1999. Even on what we know now, the AWB kickbacks are set to become the Howard Government's biggest scandal. The buckpassing and obfuscation of people working in a government-approved commercial monopoly, and directly on the public payroll, already surpass the Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez affairs. Rather than the mistreatment of two vulnerable women, the AWB affair calls into question the commitment of senior officials to Australia's national interest. This wretched business is destined to go down as Mr Howard's version of the scandal that earned his hero, Bob Menzies, the moniker "Pig Iron Bob".