That's what Mark Steyn calls it.

The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan's Secretariat.

In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody's guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN's own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

So where's the media that couldn't get enough of the Enron scandal?

At first, the story was that there was roughly 10 billion USD in kickbacks out of 60 billion USD. That would make it roughly on the order of the worst of the corporate scandals. But given the actually amounts appear to be 100 billion USD, and 40 billion USD of that is completely unaccounted for (ie, not counting the 10 billion USD in kickbacks), then I wonder who got it?

William Safire's been writing about this nascent scandal in his New York Times column. But apparently, his editors at the Times haven't been reading him.

If they had been, they'd be investigating the story. Right?

Yeah.