Feeding the hungry without helping Saddam

This story was published in the July 27, 1991, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.

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There is a way to feed food to the hungry in Iraq without feeding leverage to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein:

Let the United Nations distribute the food.

The Iraqi government has asked the U.N. to relax its embargo enough to let Saddam sell oil to buy food for the hungry. And if it truly were that simple, the U.N. wouldn’t object.

But the well-founded suspicion is that this is another ruse — that Saddam will take the money and convert it to purposes other than feeding the hungry. He is capable of that. He is capable of taking money that could be used for food and spending it on military hardware instead.

He is also capable of and practiced at distributing what food he obtains to his closest supporters and their families and letting the rank and file starve.

The whole thing places the U.N. (and the United States) in a bit of a box:

Does the U.N. ignore the fact innocent people are going hungry in Iraq, keeping the pressure on Saddam no matter what the cost in lives, no matter what the suffering?

Or does it let Saddam sell oil in the hope he will get some of the food to the innocent?

Perhaps the answer is to follow neither of those two narrow choices and to make Saddam an offer he can’t refuse without proving his insincerity in worrying about the hungry:

The U.N. should let him sell the oil, providing that the United Nations itself is designated to buy and deliver the food that is paid for with that money. That way there would be an honest accounting — with the money actually going for food.

That way people genuinely in need would get fed. — B.H.