Amenhotep, part II

Cheney also pointed to Duelfer's conclusion that Hussein had corrupted the U.N. "Oil for Food" program, using it to undermine the sanctions and "provide the means to enhance dual-use infrastructure and potential WMD-related development."

Said Cheney, "The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down." Therefore, there was no reason to hold off the invasion and give U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq more time to complete their work, Cheney said.

Yeah, you remember that moving speech where Bush said "Saddam has almost got enough governments bought off to take the sanctions down, and then, after a few years, he'll have weapons, so we have to attack NOW! Because all our many attempts to reinforce the sanctions or clean up the corruption in the Oil for Food program have failed miserably."

And the legal justification for the attack that depends on enforcing those UN Resolutions against building support to take down sanctions?

And that argument they've been making that the reason we didn't work to get Russia and the others on our side was that they'd been corrupted by the Oil for Food scandal, which, by the way, the Bush administration has been in the lead on criticizing?

Yeah, that's the ticket. Sanctions were about to fail. Yeah.

UPDATE: By the way, the original accusations about the corruption of the Oil for Food program came from the ever-so-reliable Ahmed Chalabi, known to have produced forgeries in the past. I have yet to see reports that the original documents supporting this have been turned over to the independent Volcker Commission authorized to investigate this, despite many requests. It is unclear to me at this point whether Duelfer has seen them and verified them.