"Petrole contre nourriture."

Claudia Rosett has a new column over at NRO: Frenchman Fried?---

Even the French have finally discovered the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal. With the arrest in Paris this week of a former French ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard Merimee, alleged to have received illicit and lucrative contracts to buy oil from Saddam Hussein's U.N.-sanctioned regime, the French newspapers are now aflutter over "petrole contre nourriture."

The funny thing is, while France had plenty to do with Oil-for-Food, Merimee's main trail leads not to the Quai d'Orsay, but to the doorstep of the U.N. secretary general. Authorities at the French foreign ministry have said the allegations against Merimee concern his activities after he retired as French ambassador to the U.N., and they're probably right. During the period most in question — late 2001 — Merimee was working primarily not for La France, but with the rank of U.N. undersecretary general, as a handpicked high-level "special adviser" for Kofi Annan.

That fact seems to have escaped Annan himself, who, as the French investigation was turning hot, turned up on Swiss TV last weekend lamenting in French that criticism from "these people" (presumably he meant the people who object to corruption at the U.N.) is "unfair" and "hard to bear." If that is Annan's bottom line after abundant evidence that his handpicked head of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, was on the take from Saddam, and that his own son, Kojo Annan, sought to profit from the program, then perhaps the case of Merimee will not interest the secretary general in the least.

Read the rest. Claudia has done a ton of work on the whole scandal.