France's former U.N. ambassador has been taken into custody as part of an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing in the Iraq oil-for-food program, judicial officials said Tuesday.

Jean-Bernard Merimee, 68, who also was ambassador to Italy from 1995-98 and to Australia in the 1980s, is suspected of having received kickbacks in the form of oil allocations from the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He was also a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan from 1999 to 2002.

Saddam manipulated the program under a scheme by which he essentially sold oil at a reduced rate to favored buyers, who could then turn around and sell the oil at a hefty profit.

The lawyer, Adrian Gonzalez, told The Sunday Telegraph that he believed the committee, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was determined to protect the secretary-general.

According to Mr Gonzalez, Mr Parton felt that the committee had effectively divided the body of evidence relating to the oil-for-food scandal into testimony that it did want to hear, and testimony that it did not.

While the "field teams" led by Mr Parton and Miranda Duncan, who has also stepped down, were coming to one conclusion, he said, committee members appeared to want to draw a different conclusion to protect senior UN officials.

In an interview with CNN, a member of the Volcker panel, Richard Goldstone, discounted a media report that the two resigned to protest conclusions the panel had reached about U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

He said Parton and Duncan had completed their work and were already set to leave.

"Contrary to recent published reports, I resigned my position as senior investigative counsel for the IIC not because my work was complete, but on principle," Parton said in the statement. He declined further comment.

The Canadian company that Saddam Hussein invested a million dollars in belonged to the Prime Minister of Canada, canadafreepress.com has discovered.

Cordex Petroleum Inc., launched with Saddam’s million by Prime Minister Paul Martin’s mentor Maurice Strong’s son Fred Strong, is listed among Martin’s assets to the Federal Ethics committee on November 4, 2003.

Among Martin’s Public Declaration of Declarable Assets are: "The Canada Steamship Lines Group Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"; "Canada Steamship Lines Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"–Cordex Petroleums Inc. (Alberta, Canada) 4.6 percent owned by the CSL Group Inc."

Yesterday, Strong admitted that Tongsun Park, the Korean man accused by U.S. federal authorities of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, invested in Cordex, the company he owned with his son, in 1997.

In that admission, Strong describes Cordex as a Denver-based company. Cordex Petroleum Inc. is listed among Martin’s assets as an Alberta-based company.

Since the U.N.'s self-described dawn of integrity three years ago (one of several such sunrises since Mr. Annan became secretary-general in 1997), we have seen the sex-for-food scandal in the Congo, featuring the rape of minors by U.N. peacekeepers, which continued well after press disclosures last year prompted a U.N. internal investigation. We have seen theft at the World Meteorological Association, scandal in the U.N. audit department, the resignation over sexual harassment charges of the refugee high commissioner Ruud Lubbers, turmoil within the Electoral Assistance Division, and allegations of corruption involving the U.N.'s Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization. We have seen rebellion by the U.N. Staff Union against "senior management, and a raft of resignations by senior U.N. officials who nonetheless linger on the premises on official salaries of a dollar a year, plus the various perquisites and connections the place affords.

Biggest of all, we have seen the former Oil for Food relief program for Iraq blow like Krakatoa. The program's executive director, Benon Sevan, has been accused by the U.N.-authorized inquiry, led by Paul Volcker, of engaging in a severe conflict of interest. Among other items, Mr. Sevan was found to have been receiving large mysterious payments from his pensioner aunt in Cyprus. The U.N. Secretariat sent out secret hush letters to major U.N. Oil for Food contractors, Saybolt and Cotecna, hired by the U.N. to inspect Saddam's oil and food deals. Congressional investigators and Mr. Volcker's team have since discovered that not only was there far too little inspecting required by the U.N., but that the awarding of U.N. contracts to both parties was done in violation of the U.N.'s own procedures.

We have learned step by step--via details unearthed by the press, not conflict-of-interest disclosures by the U.N.-- that the secretary-general's own son, Kojo Annan, received payments during the course of the program from one of the Oil for Food contractors on the receiving end of last year's U.N. hush letters, Switzerland-based Cotecna Inspections SA. Last month the Volcker inquiry, in an interim report, said these payments routed through various conduits might have totaled more than $480,000. [...]

And how is the U.N. handling the possibility that some of its high-ranking officials may be under investigation for sitting on illicit millions in secret payoffs from a former totalitarian regime under sanctions? In any private company, or any democratic government, this would fill top management not only with dismay, but with an urgent mission to ransack the place to the rafters, immediately.

At the U.N., there has been no sign of any such urgency. At a press briefing Monday, Kofi Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, when asked for details that might help identify the accused officials, told reporters to go check the library (where reporters were told the materials needed were not on file). Mr. Eckhard further advised that "a deputy attorney general has issued a sealed indictment. So let's let that process run its course."

On the rest of the Oil for Food scene, Mr. Annan has advised us all to wait for the findings of the Volcker investigation, authorized more than a year ago, but not planning to issue a final report until this summer. Meanwhile, Mr. Annan himself raced before the cameras just two hours after Mr. Volcker's most recent interim report, March 29, to declare himself "exonerated."

The bottom line is that all the money raised by the sale of this oil was supposed to go to feed and clothe the needy, the starving, the thirsty, the hungry, and the illegal aliens in Iraq, and, what? Ten, 12% went to those groups of people. The rest of it went to Saddam and whatever everybody else he had bribed. There truly was a coalition of the bribed, but it was nothing to do with the United States. Everybody's name is on this list except Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush and Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. But get this. This is the end of the story: "Today's report notes that Annan's chief of staff, Iqbal Riza authorized an aide to shred three years' worth of files related to the oil-for-food program. Iqbal Riza gave his authorization April 22nd." Authorization to shred three years' worth of files on April 22, the day after the security counsel passed a resolution welcoming Volcker's investigation! So the Security Council authorizes the investigation, Annan's chief of staff, Iqbal Riza then proceeds to start shredding three years worth of documents.

The report of Paul Volcker’s Independent Inquiry Committee has revealed what I concluded many months ago through the initial investigation of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations -- Kofi Annan is responsible for the failed management that resulted in the fraud and abuse of the Oil-for-Food Program. His lack of leadership, combined with conflicts of interest and a lack of responsibility and accountability point to one, and only one, outcome: His resignation.

the un's honesty problems have got them into further trouble this week。 it seems it wasn't enough for annan to appoint some old political hack to perform a secret internal 'investigation' of unscam。 nor apparently was it enough that the 'investigation' would not have the legal power to get people to speak or the power to demand documents。 nor apparently was it enough for annan to back un employees refusing to cooperate with this 'investigation' or with other real investigations。 nor apparently was it enough that volcker must report directly to annan， presumably so that annan can avoid embarrassing leaks。。。　it seems that in order to protect annan's gleaming 'integrity'， what they really needed was an old political hack with deep ties to the unscam conspiracy：

Reading the report, you come to the conclusion that in a normal (non-UN) situation many of the people involved would quite simply go to jail, but here there is no apparent jurisdiction. An example is the former UN Chef de Cabinet S. Iqbal Riza who directed his assistant to shred many documents concerning Oil-for-Food. His assistant wondered if she should be doing this with so many documents but Mr. Riza told her to go ahead and scrawled his gratitude on the memorandum: "Fine. Thanks. (A heavy task!)" Besides being hugely corrupt, Mr. Riza is evidently something of a nitwit for leaving a paper trail. Riza destroyed three years' worth of documents!

The committee has been interviewing Pierre Mouselli, a businessman in Paris who was Kojo's business partner. Their relationship started in 1998 when then 45-year old Mouselli met young Kojo (then 23) at a Bastille Day Party in the French Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria. Mouselli, who has been a cooperative witness and is not under investigation himself, has told the committee numerous interesting things, which deserved to be followed up, They include:

1. Previously unrevealed private meetings between Kojo and two separate Iraqi Ambassadors to Nigeria, arranged by Mouselli in or about August 1998. At these meetings Kojo presented the business card of Cotecna, which subsequently won the lucrative oil inspection contract for Oil-for-Food. Cotecna had previously been blacklisted from doing business in Nigeria for alleged arms trafficking.

2. A trip in September 1998 by Mouselli and Kojo to the Non-Aligned Nations Movement Conference in Durban, South Africa during which they traveled with the Secretary General's entourage and later had a private lunch with Kofi Annan. In Mouselli's view, the purpose of the lunch was to make the Secretary General aware of the various business dealings in which he and Kojo were engaged, in order to get the Secretary General's "blessing". It was Mouselli's understanding at the time that Kojo had previously discussed the Iraqi Embassy visits with his father, though he does not recall specific statements regarding the UN inspection contracts.

If Paul Volcker's preliminary report on Oil-for-Food dealt with the organisation's unofficial interests, the UN's other report of the week accurately captured their blithe insouciance to their official one. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the Polly Toynbee-Clare Short-approved multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what's going on in Darfur. They've just reported back that it's not genocide.

That's great news, isn't it? For as yet another Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared in December: "Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated." So thank goodness this isn't genocide. Instead, it's just 70,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group – which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, and Polly and Clare don't have to worry their pretty little heads about it.

That's the transnational establishment's alternative to Bush and Howard: appoint a committee that agrees on the need to do nothing.

A massive logistical operation has been established through the good work of the UN Joint Logistics Center-- It includes an airbridge that brings in supplies from around the world. In Indonesia alone, the UN and IOM have a fleet of 300 trucks. The UN also has 11 helicopters and 3 huge cargo ships operational in Sumatra.

And the 300 trucks? Notice how the UN press release rolls together IOM and UN. It would be akin to stating, "Between them the United States and Mexico have 12 aircraft carrier battlegroups."

He now had a total pledge from the United States of $39 million, all of which had been received; the World Food Programme had received $28 million from that country. Japan was in a class of its own, but other large donors included Norway, Sweden, the European Commission and Germany.

When it's convenient, Egeland rolls in work done by non-UN actors and makes it seem like the UN has done it, e.g., USAID "cash-for-work" programs have cleared the rubble away and made school re-openings possible -- the UN didn't do that!

Yet when talking about pledges, he mentions only money pledged or given the UN! He attempts to minimize the role of the USA -- by far the biggest contributor to the relief effort. He praises Japan for being in a class by itself. Why? The Japanese have given the UN $229 million. The US is giving only a relatively small portion of its tsunami relief moneys to the UN, so it doesn't count -- quite aside from the fact that even prior to the tsunami the USA was providing about 40% of the WFP and UNHCR budgets. Notice how he can not bring himself to mention AIRCRAFT carriers; they presumably get[s] covered under "and so forth."

The Diplomad finds absolutely stunning the language about the response being "remarkably, perhaps singularly, effective, swift and muscular" and that it "had succeeded in just one month. Normally, such a phase took three or more months . . ." Why was it so quick and effective? Thanks to President Bush who quickly threw together a "core group" of nations that responded right away, without waiting for the UN.

The Combined Support Group - Indonesia has flown 1,056 sorties to deliver 1,447,700 lbs of food, 989,200 lbs of water and 1,067,800 lbs of medical supplies, and evacuate 420 Indonesian tsunami victims. CSG-I has delivered more than 3 million pounds of material to tsunami survivors.

Volcker acted as a paid adviser — and remains an adviser — to a company that is closely linked to Total, the French oil giant that bought $1.75 billion of oil from Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program. Volcker also acted as an adviser to BNP Paribas, the French bank that is one of the focal points of the investigation. [...]

The United Nations defended its choice of Volcker to head up the ICC.

"The secretary general's reason for choosing Mr. Volcker to head the inquiry was that his reputation puts him above such questions," U.N. spokesman Edward Mortimer told FOX News in an e-mail. "He is well known to be an American of unimpeachable patriotism and integrity, and one of the most prominent, distinguished and highly respected public servants in the world. The U.N. has total confidence in his independence and objectivity."

While many questions concerning Oil-for-Food remain unanswered, one conclusion has become abundantly clear: Kofi Annan should resign. The decision to call for his resignation does not come easily, but I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, as long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the U.N.'s collective nose.

Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. for all but a few days of the Oil-for-Food program, and he must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.'s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam's abuses. The consequences of the U.N.'s ineptitude cannot be overstated: Saddam was empowered to withstand the sanctions regime, remain in power, and even rebuild his military. Needless to say, he made the Iraqi people suffer even more by importing substandard food and medicine under the Oil-for-Food program and pawning it off as first-rate humanitarian aid.

Since it was never likely that the U.N. Security Council, some of whose permanent members were awash in Saddam's favors, would ever call for Saddam's removal, the U.S. and its coalition partners were forced to put troops in harm's way to oust him by force. Today, money swindled from Oil-for-Food may be funding the insurgency against coalition troops in Iraq and other terrorist activities against U.S. interests. Simply put, the troops would probably not have been placed in such danger if the U.N. had done its job in administering sanctions and Oil-for-Food.

This systemic failure of the U.N. and Oil-for-Food is exacerbated by evidence that at least one senior U.N. official -- Benon Sevan, Mr. Annan's hand-picked director of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food oversight agency -- reportedly received bribes from Saddam. According to documents from the Iraqi oil ministry that were obtained by us, Mr. Sevan received several allotments of oil under Oil-for-Food, each of which was worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

To make matters worse, the actions of Mr. Annan's own son have been called into question. Specifically, the U.N. recently admitted that Kojo Annan received more money than previously disclosed from a Swiss company named Cotecna, which was hired by the U.N. to monitor Iraq's imports under Oil-for-Food. Recently, there are growing, albeit unproven, allegations that Kofi Annan himself not only understands his son's role in this scandal -- but that he has been less than forthcoming in what he knew, and when he knew it.

The final losers are the U.N. and Kofi Annan. The U.N. has been invisible. As Kofi Annan has been trying to keep his head above oil, he has issued his usual appeal for restraint. But this crisis has brought forth the heroes of the Cold War from retirement -- Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and Margaret Thatcher -- to encourage the orange revolutionaries. And Annan cannot begin to compete with their moral authority or the legitimacy they can bestow.

Linked in the past to sex crimes in East Timor, and prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo, UN peacekeepers have now been accused of sexually abusing the very population they were deployed to protect in Congo. And while the 150 allegations of rape, pedophelia and solicitation in Congo may be the UN’ worst sex scandal in years, chronic problems almost guarantee that few of the suspects will face serious punishment.

The problem is simple: The UN often implores nations to discipline their peacekeepers, but it has little power to enforce the rules.

A senior UN official was cleared of sexual harassment earlier this year because the secretary general [annan] rejected the verdict of an internal watchdog. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers, 65, a former Dutch prime minister, escaped censure in July when Kofi Annan dismissed a complaint. But a revised report issued by UN watchdogs on Thursday revealed that investigators supported the allegation.

Slightly simplified, this is how it often works. A UN bureaucrat gets hold of a delegate from a sympathetic country and gets that country's delegation to propose some often innocuous sounding resolution -- let's make up a typical one right here, "The Effect of Deforestation on the Development of Sub-Saharan Africa." It will have a few bland paragraphs expressing concern about deforestation in Africa, note the impact it has on the livelihood of Africans especially the "most vulnerable sectors of the population," and then will have a little paragraph at the end calling on the Secretary General to submit a report to the next General Assembly on the impact of deforestation in Africa. Normally such a resolution gets adopted by consensus by the appropriate committee, and then goes to the UNGA where its hammered through ASAP. Under the Reagan Administration, the US delegation made a specialty of finding these little gems and trying to kill them or at least make clear that they would not pass by consensus. That is tough and frustrating work; it takes up incredible amounts of time and effort and burns up lots of political capital. Such efforts offend the MSM, powerful US NGOs and other lobby groups. The UN bureaucracy knows that at most only the US will fight these resolutions; the UN uses its allies in the MSM and the NGO "community" to savage the US and make the US look uncaring about deforestation and poverty, etc. As a result, often the US will back off as the politicial costs are seen as too great to be alone and on the "wrong" side of such an issue.

So the resolution passes. The UN bureaucracy gets tasked with writing a report. Usually these reports are short, based on pre-existing information that in the age of the internet would take an intern a couple of hours to put together, but, nevertheless, for some odd reason seem to require lots of travel by UN bureaucrats. The report will conclude that there is need for further study of this critical topic and might perhaps recommend the holding of a special conference or meeting on the topic. It goes to the next UNGA which agrees that further work is needed and asks the UN Secretariat to go ahead and provide another report to the next UNGA, and so on and on. The topic is now firmly embedded in the UN agenda -- almost impossible to remove -- and highly paid bureaucrats now have sinecures producing endless reports calling for more reports and conferences that will call for more reports and conferences. The US and a handful of other major donors pay for all this.

One of the next big chapters in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal will involve the family of the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose son turns out to have been receiving payments as recently as early this year from a key contractor in the oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general's son, Kojo Annan, was previously reported to have worked for a Swiss-based company called Cotecna Inspection Services SA, which from 1998-2003 held a lucrative contract with the U.N. to monitor goods arriving in Saddam Hussein's Iraq under the oil-for-food program. But investigators are now looking into new information suggesting that the younger Annan received far more money over a much longer period, even after his compensation from Cotecna had reportedly ended.

"I'm angry that we find the U.N. proactively interfering with our investigation," Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, informed Lou Dobbs on CNN, "by telling certain folks not to cooperate with us." He repeated for emphasis his sharp response to Secretary General Kofi Annan's "interfering with our ability to get information we need" about the oil-for-food scandal.

Judith Miller of The Times had revealed that the Minnesota Republican, joined by ranking Democrat Carl Levin, sent a letter noting Annan's four-month foot-dragging and that "the U.N. is hindering our efforts to obtain relevant documents."

If legislative investigators were prosecutors, the name of the game Annan and his enablers are playing would be called "obstruction of justice."

The principal investigating body of the Senate is not helpless. Today witnesses from Treasury and C.I.A., as well as its own investigators, will present evidence that the huge rip-off engineered by Saddam Hussein - with the connivance of corrupt U.N. officials and companies protected by Security Council members like Russia and France - was even greater than the $10 billion figure estimated by our G.A.O. Going back to 1991 and including the predecessor to oil-for-food, an outside source tells me that the U.N.-maladministered profiteering reached $23 billion. Such heavy spending affects U.N. votes.

American prosecutors are preparing charges against Benon Sevan, the former head of the United Nations oil for food programme, who has been accused of accepting millions of dollars in kickbacks from Saddam Hussein's regime.

Congressional investigators say that France, Russia and China systematically sabotaged the former United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq by preventing the United States and Britain from investigating whether Saddam Hussein was diverting billions of dollars.

[...]

The paper suggests that France, Russia and China blocked inquiries into Iraq's manipulation of the program because their companies "had much to gain from maintaining'' the status quo. "Their businesses made billions of dollars through their involvement with the Hussein regime and O.F.F.P.," the document states, using the initials for the program. No officials of the three governments could be reached for comment.

The paper also accuses the United Nations office charged with overseeing the program of having "pressed" contractors not to rigorously inspect Iraqi oil being sold and the foreign goods being bought. The program office, headed by Benan Sevan, who is also under investigation by a committee appointed by the United Nations, turned a blind eye to corruption charges, the paper says, because it apparently saw oil-for-food "strictly as a humanitarian program."

As the Oil-for-Food program actually worked, however, the United Nations let Saddam choose his own business partners. The world body also kept secret the details of those contracts and the identities of the contractors, and it let Saddam graft at least $4.4 billion out of the program through manipulated contract prices, by estimates of the U.S. General Accountability Office.

IF, as the 9/11 Commission concludes, our "failure of imagination" left America open to the attacks of September 11, then surely some imagination is called for in tackling one of the riddles that stumped the commission: Where exactly did Osama bin Laden get the funding to set up shop in Afghanistan, reach around the globe, and strike the United States?

So let's do some imagining. Unfashionable though it may be, let's even imagine a money trail that connects Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.

By 1996, remember, bin Laden had been run out of Sudan, and seems to have been out of money. He needed a fresh bundle to rent Afghanistan from the Taliban, train recruits, expand al Qaeda's global network, and launch what eventually became the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, over in Iraq about that same time, Saddam Hussein, after a lean stretch under United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief.

The UN declared Srebrenica a "safe haven" to be "protected" by 600 Dutch UN troops.

In July 1995, Serb forces attacked. The UN did not honour its pledge. Annan's staff released evasive, confused statements. Oblivious, apparently, to the dreadfulness of the situation, they failed to sound the alarm properly and did nothing to intervene.

The Dutch fired not a single shot. NATO air power could have halted the Serbs, but Annan did not ask for NATO intervention.

Ratko Mladic, the Serb commander and war criminal, deported the women and children under the eyes of the UN, while capturing and murdering the men and adolescent boys.

No one should be surprised by the UN's inaction, because only the year before it had demonstrated utter incompetence in facing the fastest genocide in history – the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in just 100 days. UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 were Annan's responsibility before and during the crisis.

Annan was alerted four months before Hutu activists began their mass killings by a fax message from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding UN forces in Rwanda. Dallaire described in detail how the Hutus were planning "anti-Tutsi extermination". He identified his source "a Hutu" and reported that arms were ready for the impending ethnic cleansing.

Dallaire requested permission to evacuate his informant and to seize the arms cache. Annan rejected both demands, proposing that Dallaire make the informant's identity known to Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, even though the informant had expressly named the president's closest entourage as the authors of the genocide blueprint.

[...]

One might think Annan far too compromised to become secretary-general but the UN doesn't work that way. Instead of being forced to resign after Rwanda and Srebrenica, he was promoted to the post.

That is the culture of the UN: believe the best of barbarians, do nothing to provoke controversy among superiors, and let others be the butt of criticism afterwards. Even subsequent revelations about Annan's responsibility for the disasters in Rwanda and Bosnia did not affect his standing. On the contrary, he was unanimously re-elected and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

[...]

Now, despite revelations about bribery in the UN's oil-for-food program for Iraq, the world is clamouring to entrust Annan with the future of more than 20 million Iraqis who survived Saddam Hussein dictatorship. That is because of who Annan is and what the UN has become: an institution in which no shortcoming, it seems, goes unrewarded.

Why did France and Russia oppose efforts to topple Saddam Hussein's regime? And why did they press constantly, throughout the '90s, for an expansion of Iraqi oil sales? Was it their empathy for the starving children of that impoverished nation? Their desire to stop the United States from arrogantly imposing its vision upon the Middle East?

It now looks like they it was simply because they were on the take. Saddam was their cash cow. If President Bush has suffered some discredit over his apparently false - but not disingenuous - claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the lapse is minor compared to the outright personal selfishness and criminality that appears to have motivated many of those who opposed his efforts to rid the world of one of its worst dictators.

[....]

The defect of international coalitions is that they include the just and the unjust, the bribed and the honest, the democratic and the autocratic. And their members cannot be trusted equally. The group that stood up and backed the invasion of Iraq was nicknamed "the Coalition of the Willing." Now it appears it was also "the Coalition of the Honest."