Russia's oily dealings

Scripps Howard News Service: At the time, Russia's lobbying to lift oil sanctions against Iraq made a certain kind of sense. Saddam Hussein's regime owed Russia billions and Moscow was hoping to get it back. Now it turns out there was more -- much more -- to Russia's agitating on behalf of Iraq in the United Nations. Saddam was bribing key Russian officials with cut-rate oil allocations.
Instead of spending the money on food, medicine and other humanitarian assistance, the whole point of the program, Saddam spent it on himself and his underlings.
Thus a well-intentioned program seems to have been rotten from the start.
Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Feisal Amin Istrabadi, told The Washington Post, "There were certainly commercial and political interests involved, and Russia behaved like any other state in looking out for itself." Sadly, that seems to have been the case.