Oil-for-Food

Claudia Rosett has another column in today’s Wall Street Journal. The information I was hoping to see, but didn’t, was more about this tantalizing excerpt in another one of her recent columns:

[Maurice] Strong is a Canadian tycoon with extensive experience at the United Nations, where he has served as secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit, as chief architect of the Kyoto Treaty, and as the world body’s guru of governance in the 1990s. Mr. Strong also has abundant connections in both North and South Korea [emphasis mine].

The Toronto Free Press has an outstanding chronology of Oil-for-Food. The Free Press is clearly hostile to Strong and the U.N., but if you can sift through the New York Times, you can sift through this.

UPDATES: There isn’t any solid evidence connecting Maurice Strong’s leniency toward North Korea with corruption, but there are some interesting connections. Connections, of course, can be another way of saying “guilt by association.” I’d prefer to say that this is a developing story where many facts are coming to light.

Here’s a long and well-researched hit piece from the National Review, and here’s a well-researched and linked puff piece from the CBC. I report, you decide.

After reading each, however, I have to say that merely connecting Tongsun Park to Maurice Strong isn’t that significant by itself. Strong seems to be “connected” to everyone on the face of the earth including the cryogenically frozen corpse of Colonel Sanders. While the facts in this complaint certainly sound like a good fit between Maurice Strong (or someone very close to him) and U.N. Official #2, I can’t escape the logical inconsistency that the man simply doesn’t need the money. On the other hand, Maurice Strong seems to pursue influence like Robert Downey, Jr. pursues that last piece of crack he dropped between the sofa cushions, and I have little doubt he knows the identities of U.N. Officials #1 and #2, and plenty more.

I’ve already noted the similarities between the Maurice Strong position and the Beijing position on North Korea. The Toronto Free Press, which really, really does not like Maurice Strong, has some interesting information about Strong’s passion to acquire influence over China’s environmental and industrial policies, and about Strong’s discussions with senior apparatchiks in Pyongyang. Strong’s corporate holdings were mainly in the power-generation industry, and he was quite keen to build China some “clean” power plants (though he eschewed Three Gorges).

I’m not ready to call that a conflict of interest, but diplomatic pressure on North Korea was certainly not the only thing Strong wanted from Beijing. But to be fair, Strong has reportedly made substantial contributions to both the Democrats and the Republicans, too. The previous article suggests that’s illegal, but it isn’t for foreign nationals with green cards, something Strong reportedly has.