Clinton highly qualified for UN Secretary General

New York Post Online Edition: news:
"In January 2001, in the final hours his presidency, [Bill] Clinton bypassed law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to wipe the books clean for [fugitive billionaire Marc] Rich after being subjected to intense lobbying from former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Rich's jet-setting ex-wife, Denise, who donated more than $1 million to Democratic campaigns — including Sen. Hillary Rodham's first Senate race — along with an additional $450,000 to Clinton's library fund."

Thus the tangled web of Bill Clinton's finances intersects the tangled web of Middle East politics. I had been wondering why the boomlet for Clinton to become secretary general of the UN after Kofi Annan; it didn't seem to make sense. Now it becomes clearer. It seems that the requisite qualifications these days are not a dreamy commitment to dreary world socialism in the tradition of Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskold and U Thant. Now it seems the qualifications in the 21st century are a plausible connection to mass murder and helping to spread dirty money around in all the right places.

According to this article, Marc Rich has been at the center of Saddam Hussein's financial manipulations, to the extent of loaning money to the Iraqi butcher in the early 90s in return for a pledge of future favors in what became the now-infamous UN oil for food program that amounted to $20 Billion or more in graft.

But the Marc Rich story gets better. It seems he was also involved in oil deals with Iran despite US sanctions against that country, and he had lucrative dealings with the Russian mafia dons who controlled the Russian oil business. The puzzle is figuring out why the Israeli government at one point make the Rich pardon a priority on a par with the release of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.