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Enough Blame To Go AroundWhat the Volcker report says about the Oil-for-Food scandal.

By Bidisha Banerjee
Updated Friday, Feb. 11, 2005, at 6:38 PM ET
New Republic

New Republic, Feb. 21
An article analyzes the recently published Volcker report and says the U.N.-authorized probe offers no evidence of systemic corruption in the agency's Oil-for-Food program. The piece points out that "compromises that allowed Saddam to exploit the program were baked in from the start," and argues that U.S. officials knowingly overlooked Saddam's practice of smuggling cheap oil into Jordan, Turkey, and Syria—which made possible the enormous amounts of money involved in the scandal. Another essay faults the report for failing to hold Annan accountable and claims that the Oil-for-Food program did only one good thing: "In swelling and rotting to a degree that in the end the world could not ignore, Oil-for-Food, in the postmortem, offers an unprecedented view into the inner workings of the United Nations." While the first article insists that the United States needs to stop trying to "starve and intimidate" the United Nations, the second one emphasizes that change has to start in Annan's office.

Economist

Economist, Feb.10
Insisting that President Bush "will have to knock heads together harder than Mr. Clinton did in 2000," an editorial prompted by the recent meeting between Condoleezza Rice, Israel's Ariel Sharon, and Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas argues, "Quitting Gaza could be an excellent first step. But then Israel will have to leave most of the West Bank too." A related piece underscores the fragility of the new cease-fire, announced this week: "But a single trigger-happy Palestinian militant or Israeli soldier or settler could blow the ceasefire apart." ... Another piece evaluates an Australian nonprofit research group's decision to make available through "open-source" licensing the details of a new biotech procedure that allows scientists to "transfer genes into plants." The traditional method has been rigorously patented, so this move should benefit people in poor countries who are working to modify agricultural genes. "All that is required is that improvements to the technique itself be shared, to the benefit of all users." Monsanto, which holds most of the world's agricultural patents, thinks that this "seems to complement, not threaten, its business model."

New York Times Magazine

New York Times Magazine, Feb. 13
Internet dating is so last year—at least for busy New York professionals who can afford to pay a professional matchmaker $10,000-$15,000 to arrange their marriages. Claiming that matchmakers possess rare and unique skills, the cover story profiles several Cupids-for-hire who "have a deep distrust for romance," and a "finely honed ability to instantly classify people anthropologically, according to socioeconomic type, and pair them off accordingly." … A brief profile of Ammar Abdulhamid, founder of The Tharwa Project, a watchdog Web site about minorities in the Middle East, touches on the Syrian novelist's transformation from Islamic fundamentalist to liberal Arab and his quest to "explain[n] the American viewpoint to anyone in Damascus who will listen." … In a Q&A, Roger Ebert reveals that he loves Darwinism and rice cookers but hates interviewing people whose movies he didn't like (interviewing Oliver Stone after Alexander, for example, was "painful.")

The New Yorker

The New Yorker, Feb. 14 and 21
A piece explains how the CIA's use of "extraordinary rendition"—begun in the mid-1990s—has changed since Sept. 11: The agency has reportedly flown about 150 terrorism suspects to foreign countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the suspects have been tortured or executed. The article links the 1998 terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the U.S.-sponsored torture and execution of suspected Muslim militants in Albania and reports several other instances where people were brutalized without having any confirmed evidence against them. … Another article reports on a Czech professor of shoe technology who boiled bearskin in the brains and liver of a pig and substituted hay and moss for socks in order to re-create prehistoric footwear. After hiking Europe's mountains in Otzi-the-Ice-Man's shoes, the professor concluded that the prehistoric models outperform modern hiking boots. … This 80th anniversary issue also contains Roger Angell's remembrance of his stepfather, E.B. White.

Weekly Standard

Weekly Standard, Feb. 14 and 21
Gertrude Himmelfarb delivers a homage to Lionel Trilling's 1940 essay on T.S. Eliot, "Elements That Are Wanted." Trilling claimed that the anti-Stalinist left had something to learn from Eliot's conservative religious politics; Himmelfarb says that the essay made her and other radicals of her generation skeptical of liberalism. While Trilling is often viewed as a granddaddy of neoconservatism, the piece argues that Trilling's emphasis on the "variety, complexity, and difficulty" in literature is the critic's legacy to both conservatives and liberals. … An editorial by William Kristol and Robert Kagan celebrates the Iraqi elections, as well as the recent elections in Afghanistan and Palestine. It chides Newsweek and the New Republic for claiming that the Iraqi votes were "essentially meaningless," and argues, "It is today more possible than ever before to envision a future in which the Middle East and the Muslim world truly are transformed. For this, no one will deserve more credit than George W. Bush."

Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report

Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 14
Social Security. Newsweek provides a lucid and accessible critique of President Bush's Social Security plan. Arguing that the current system is totally flawed but hardly on the brink of collapse, the piece suggests that issues like the Medicare prescription drug program demand attention sooner; it suggests the real solution involves "putting more money into the system by raising wage taxes a tad, taking less out by increasing the retirement age and trimming benefit formulas and setting up private accounts funded by wage earners." Time provides a Q&A that explains how the plan works without attempting to criticize it. The piece concludes that, even though Bush's recommendations would mean that future recipients would get less, "Given the existing system's long-term funding challenges, of course, that kind of cut could happen anyway." The magazine also evaluates the mixed results that private accounts have yielded in Chile, Britain, Sweden, and Singapore and concludes that "no one gets it right on the first try."

More election coverage. The newsweeklies are still chewing on the Iraqi elections. Time notes the bemusement of a Sunni leader who'd encouraged Sunnis to boycott the elections: "I felt we missed a chance to give something to our people." Newsweek's profile of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani focuses on the contradictions in his character: He's Iranian, but he's "the most powerful man in Iraq!" … He doesn't leave his tiny house in a Najaf slum, but he has high-speed Internet!, etc. … And U.S. News evalutes Iraqi security and the U.S. military's attempt to be seen as helpers instead of occupiers. It claims, "The U.S. military is relearning, sometimes painfully, many of the lessons of counterinsurgency that it hoped to forget after Vietnam." … Another article focuses on a pacifist Marine who was court-martialed in December. He cleared land mines and roadside bombs but would not carry a weapon.

Odds and ends. Time is the latest publication to weigh in on the study showing imaginary friends are good for children, saying "Children who play with imaginary companions may have an edge over their peers." (Read Slate's Ann Hulbert on imaginary friends here.) … In U.S. News, a review of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America remarks on the increased popularity of religious colleges—Buddhist, Christian, Jewish. … Time's cover story on Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan claims that Khan and his cronies "played a bigger role in helping Tehran and Pyongyang than had been previously disclosed" and also met with a "dizzying" number of prospective nuke-buyers.

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Bidisha Banerjee is a former Slate editorial assistant.
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