This logic holds even in the messy scandal over the Oil-for-Food Program, a badly managed affair surrounded by corruption. But who designed the Oil-for-Food Program? The United States and Britain. They wrote the rules that allowed Saddam Hussein to choose his trading partners, banks and consultants. They vetted every one of the 30,000 contracts that passed through the program. They held up 5,000 over concerns about materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction, but not one over concerns about corruption. Saddam's major revenues actually came from smuggling, which was an activity the United Nations was not mandated to stop. The only ones who could have stopped it were the ones with military force in the region—the United States and Britain. The truth is that Washington—during both the Clinton and the Bush years—cared little about Iraq's corruption. It cared only about its weapons.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653227/site/newsweek/

Great points made in this article.