Originally posted by AKIron
I'll grant you the possibility that governments weren't influenced to keep Saddam in power for the money, time may reveal otherwise.
A significant issue before the UN was cooperation to which Saddam had agreed and yet refused for many years. If for no other reason he should have been removed so the UN could maintain some semblance of functionality.
Cooperation on what? As far as UN resolutions are concerned, it's cooperation on WMDs and the disposal thereof.
Well it's a similar story for the most part, it appears Saddam did cooperate: He let in inspectors, although as you'll no doubt point out when UNSCOM were being used as US spies, Saddam said so, and did not allow them access to presidential palaces and other areas that had no link to WMDs. And it was the US, not Saddam who told UNSCOM to get out when the US denied this and sought to strong-arm him into shutting up by bombing Iraq (the targets selected by using the latest intelligence gleaned from their informers in the UNSCOM inspectors).
And perhaps the best evidence of cooperation is that according to the latest US intelligence, he destroyed his WMDs mostly in 1991.
So perhaps France, Germany and Russia felt that he had cooperated enough to not need the UN to invade and depose him and in this they would of course have been correct too, according to the Bush Administration, at least.
Besides if oil-for-food was such a dreadful scam stopping the UN from functioning and so forth surely the bulk of the blame rests on the UN member that called for this ill-considered or perhaps deliberately corrupt resolution's introduction in the first place?