[oil for food]

A friend of mine recently decribed the oil-for-food scandal as feeling to him a bit like Whitewater in the early days: the sheer volume of accusations makes it feel like there must be something going on, but it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on just who is accused of what sort of wrongdoing.

Now Slate provides a helpful guide to who did what. Note the conclusion:

The program did save lives: Average daily calorie intake nearly doubled in Iraq from 1996 to 2002. And Saddam never reconstituted the nuclear weapons program that was the ostensible reason for last year’s invasion. The greatest tragedy of the oil-for-food program may be that, for all its Byzantine corruption, we never realized just how effective it was.