IMORALIDADES

"So now we know the truth. Forget the row about Saddam's non-existent weapons stockpiles. That, after all, should never have been the justification for war in the first place. The proper casus belli for regime change in Baghdad was Saddam's non-compliance with 17 United Nations resolutions over a period of more than 12 years.

The real scandal contained in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) that was published last week concerns the fecklessness of the United Nations, not to mention the treacherous conduct of some of its security council members, in its dealings with Saddam's regime between the end of the 1991 Gulf war and last year's Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In the diplomatic build-up to last year's war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, the two most vociferous opponents of military action were Russia and France. Even though Presidents Putin and Chirac reluctantly signed up to UN Security Council resolution 1441 in November 2002 - which threatened Saddam with "serious consequences" if he did not fully comply - they were at the forefront of the international campaign to block military action.

At the time it was felt that their main motivation was to protect their lucrative trade ties with Baghdad. In late 2002, Saddam still owed the Russians some $10 billion, mainly for illegal arms deals. France came next in the trade rankings.

Even so, Moscow and Paris tried to claim that they were opposing the war as a matter of principle. That was certainly the impression Mr Chirac sought to give when he announced that he would veto any second UN resolution that authorised military action. Mr Putin also opposed the invasion of Iraq and, just as hostilities were about to commence, even dispatched Yevgeny Primakov, his trusty former KGB colleague, to Baghdad on a last-ditch mission to persuade Saddam to comply and avoid war.

Thanks to the efforts of the ISG team, we now know that there was another, even less palatable, explanation for their duplicity. Far from seeking to protect their lucrative trade ties, the real explanation for the opposition of France and Russia to the war was that both countries' political establishments were deeply implicated in a lucrative scam to divert the profits of the UN's oil-for-food programme into their own private coffers.

From the moment the oil-for-food programme was introduced in 1996, Saddam concentrated all his energies on attempting to subvert it. The complex oil-for-food programme was introduced so that the profits from UN-supervised Iraqi oil sales would pay for essential healthcare supplies. The programme was conceived, it should be remembered, to counter the mounting effectiveness of the propaganda campaign of hard-Left activists such as George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who argued that the wide-ranging UN sanctions introduced following the Gulf war were responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.

But as the ISG report clearly demonstrates, Saddam skilfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding.

Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Mr Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

By November 2001 - just two months after the 9/11 attacks - Saddam was so confident of breaking the UN's sanctions stranglehold that Baghdad hosted a trade fair that attracted hundreds of foreign companies in the expectation that they would soon be able to establish lucrative trade links with Saddam's regime. As Charles Duelfer, the author of the ISG report commented, by 2001 Saddam's "long struggle to outlast the containment policy seemed tantalisingly close".

The 9/11 attacks ended his hopes of survival as the West, or rather Washington and London, finally found the will to force the Iraqi leader to comply with the ceasefire obligations that he committed himself to at the end of the first Gulf war.

While the ISG report provides embarrassing reading for all those who actively participated in Saddam's scam, the real victim is the UN itself, whose claim to the moral high ground when confronting rogue regimes and dictators now lies in tatters.

Indeed, the failure of the UN to confront the error of its ways - Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, still refuses to make public the findings of his oil-for-food inquiry - poses a serious problem for those countries that remain committed to prosecuting the war on terror.

The sanctions regime against Saddam may have been a failure, but the threat of sanctions nevertheless remains an important first step in trying to persuade rogue states to reform. If Iran, for example, continues to defy the International Atomic Energy Agency over its nuclear programme, the logical response would be for the UN to impose sanctions against Teheran. But after the UN's Iraq debacle, it is highly unlikely that anyone - least of all Iran - could take such a threat seriously."

in THE DAILY TELEGRAPH