Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  Thanks to the Oil-for-Food program, his policy of eroding the sanctions had shown significant progress. The UN weapons inspectors had been thrown out of the country three years earlier and had still not been allowed back. As of 2001, there was no longer any legal limit on how much oil Iraq could sell, and Iraqi applications for imports varied greatly, from flatbed trucks to Viagra.

  Even as anti-sanctions activists continued to claim (falsely) that 5,000 children were dying every month because of the sanctions, Baghdad was holding trade fairs attended by thousands of international companies looking to do business in Iraq. It seemed as if even the government had gotten tired of its own propaganda campaign, and the parades of small coffins through the streets of Baghdad became less frequent. Most serious journalists traveling to Iraq no longer bought the government’s lies anyway.

  The fact that the Iraqi government could rely on the Oil-for-Food program to cover its civilian needs meant that it could use its own funds, acquired through oil smuggling and illegal back-end bribes, to rebuild its security apparatus and military machine. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, Saddam Hussein might have accumulated as much as $13 billion from illegal oil sales and smuggling between 1997 and 2003.3 Saddam’s cronies got fat once again, and the region’s leaders were beginning to treat him with the respect they had once shown him before the Gulf War. Proof of that came when the Iraqi vice president and a Saudi royal were caught on camera kissing at an Arab summit.

  The chances of a successful coup were as slim as ever, and the only way the regime in Iraq was going to change was if Saddam slipped in the shower and fractured his skull against his golden faucet. If Saddam had died abruptly, it is likely that Iraq would have descended into civil war rather quickly, and the international community would have had to face the question of whether to intervene in order to reestablish order or risk losing access to the world’s second-largest oil reserves.

  The issue of Iraq hardly surfaced in the 2000 campaign. Candidate George Bush had mumbled something about tightening the sanctions. What sanctions? The dramatic mushrooming of the UN Oil-for-Food program had all but nullified them. What Saddam could not buy legally through the UN he bought illegally from Russian, Jordanian, and Ukrainian companies.

  Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz had consistently argued for opposing Saddam Hussein more forcefully. Some inside the Clinton administration, like Kenneth Pollack, agreed, but during the 2000 campaign, their voices were hardly heard; the expression “regime change” had yet to appear on the public’s radar screen. In fact, according to Bob Woodward, Bush 43 even said to his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that he thought his father had done the right thing in 1991 by sticking to the UN mandate and stopping short of overthrowing Saddam.

  By the time of the September 11 attacks, Saddam had every reason to feel safe. Still, his reaction to the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor was unwise. When he first heard of the attacks, he rejoiced and declared publicly that they were the result of America’s “evil policy,” contending that the United States exported corruption and crime through its military forces and its movies.4 He was the only national leader in the world to come out publicly in support of the terrorist attacks.

  In all fairness, it was difficult to foresee that the aftershocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers would soon topple his own statues. The traditional policy of the United States was to react to terrorist attacks by going after the actual perpetrators. In this case, America reacted as it had only twice before in its history, during the world wars of the twentieth century. It reacted by seeking to radically change the world.

  The campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein began on 9/12 with a suggestion by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Iraq be attacked as part of the “first round” of the war on terror.5 His proposal, made at an afternoon National Security Council meeting, did not receive much support initially. Secretary of State Colin Powell and the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Sheldon, both opposed it. The president himself did not question the validity of attacking Iraq as part of the war on terror. But there was no provable link between Saddam Hussein and the terror attacks, so the priority remained Afghanistan.

  In the months that followed, little evidence emerged to suggest that Saddam had played a role in the September 11 attacks. Yet the argument for attacking America’s longtime foe gained ground with every meeting of the president’s principals. Powell continued to resist the idea. “What the hell, what are these guys thinking about?” he asked Chairman Sheldon after one meeting. “Can’t you get these guys back in the box?” But the split within the administration eventually gave way to a coordinated diplomatic and military strategy to effect regime change in Iraq through war.

  What tipped the scales? The anthrax scare was one of several highly stressful post-9/11 events that rattled America’s psyche and predisposed the American public toward preventive action to confront threats from weapons of mass destruction.

  After that, the notion of acting preventively to disarm Saddam was a much easier sell with the American public. Especially as much of the media fueled suspicion that Saddam had something to do with the anthrax attacks.

  Our experience in dealing with Saddam had been rather successful, we thought (mostly because we had completely ignored the harm we had done to the Iraqi people in the process). Operation Desert Storm created very few casualties and had offered images of towering success for the U.S. military. It is doubtful whether public opinion would have supported going back to Vietnam or Somalia for a war “of choice.” But Iraq had been a “positive” experience (if war can ever be called that) in the eyes of much of the public. America had gone in, gotten out clean with minimal casualties, and held a parade. The world had paid for much of the war, and in its aftermath, America entered one of the most prosperous decades in its history.

  Even though Saddam had not commandeered the 9/11 attacks or the anthrax attacks, the scales had tipped against him. As late as September 2003, seven in ten Americans still believed the Iraqi dictator was likely personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. A majority of Americans had long ago put Saddam’s name on the “to do” list. To the hawks of both parties in Washington, getting rid of him was more a question of opportunity than necessity.

  The opportunity came in the aftermath of the Afghan war, which in many ways had been anticlimactic. Certainly, it had been nothing like the “big bang” that the head of Fox News Channel, Robert Ailes, had told President Bush the American people wanted. The war in Afghanistan succeeded in toppling the Taliban, but they and Osama bin Laden seemed almost unworthy enemies for the United States. The American military machine had not been designed to go chasing after a “one-eyed man on a motorbike,” as Sheikh Omar was described in Pentagon briefings. In President Bush’s own words, “The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy’s, you know, tent, really is a joke.”6 After the fiasco at Tora Bora, in which U.S. forces reshaped Afghanistan’s mountain range with “daisy cutter” bombs but failed to catch or kill Osama bin Laden, America needed a villain on whom it could land a good, clean punch. And during the summer of 2002, it became clear that Saddam Hussein had gotten the part.

  After President Bush’s speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2002, I realized an attack on Iraq was inevitable. Back in 1998, I had witnessed the diplomatic circus that preceded any U.S. action against Saddam. It was clear to me that the U.S. would not win Security Council authorization to invade Iraq. It was also clear to me that the United States would act anyway. What was less obvious was how the United States was planning to deal with Iraq after an invasion. Did they understand the country they would be charged with running? Did they realize how deeply its economy was revolving around one man? Did they realize how profoundly eroded its basic infrastructure was? And did they understand the consequences of breaking up Saddam’s racket?

  While New York and Silicon Valley were experiencing something ak
in to a modern-day gold rush, Baghdad remained frozen in time. Under Saddam had arisen a generation of children who had grown up less educated than their parents. Unemployment levels had risen to an all-time high. Nearly half of Iraq’s young had no official job, and criminal gangs were so powerful that even Saddam had trouble controlling them. The Iraqi dictator was unable to stop the pillaging of Iraq’s Mesopotamian and Babylonian treasures that occurred during his reign. And he hardly exerted control over the unruly border tribes of western Iraq, which eventually gave allied troops their greatest headache during the occupation. Iraq’s frustrated youth, and its growing criminal networks, would present an ideal feeding ground for would-be terrorist leaders.

  Invading Iraq would be one thing. Occupying it would be another. With the primary focus on Saddam’s WMDs, the United States failed to prepare for the greater challenge of running Iraq’s economy and building up a state from scratch in a climate of increasing insecurity.

  The only institution that had experience dealing with Iraq’s economy in the past seven years was the UN Oil-for-Food program. While we had utterly failed to rein in Saddam’s fraud, we did understand how his government managed various sectors of the economy. Whether the U.S.-led invasion force would find WMDs in Iraq hardly solved the problem of how to manage the country after the war. So it seemed logical to me, at a time of such great potential turmoil, that people with our kind of experience should get involved in planning for the post-Saddam era.

  Over dinner with my former director (Swede number two) in the fall of 2002, we talked about the idea of me going back to the UN to help with what was likely to be a difficult transition to Iraqi self-rule. A strange change had occurred in the months following my departure. Cindy had been forcibly removed from her position of chief of office within the Oil-for-Food program. Apparently, her power grab had spun completely out of control and led her into confrontation with Pasha himself. In a sense, it was a logical outcome. Cindy was the consummate turf warrior. Once she had won every bureaucratic battle, the only remaining enemy would be Pasha himself.

  What issue had been at the heart of their dispute? Nobody knew. And the mystery would last for years. On weekends, Cindy could be seen rummaging through the files in Pasha’s office, preparing for what promised to be a major bureaucratic showdown with her own boss. What was she looking for?

  Cindy’s expulsion had prompted people to speculate that I might come back. Pasha himself had invited me to return. At first, I declined. But the looming war in Iraq changed my mind. The UN would have to face new challenges, and an entirely new operation might see the dawn of day—an operation I hoped would be in support of freedom and democracy in Iraq. Call it an idealistic relapse.

  While waiting for my appointment, I watched events unfold in the Security Council with increasing alarm. After thirteen years of jousting for the moral high ground, the Franco-Russian and Anglo-American duos were headed for a theatrical clash on the world stage.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Clash of Civilized Nations

  “Diplomacy is the art of nearly deceiving all your friends, but not quite deceiving your enemy.”

  KOFI BUSIA, writer, former prime minister of Ghana

  UN SECURITY COUNCIL,

  NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 5 , 2003

  It was the moment of truth. All lights were on the UN Security Council in New York. The debate would be broadcast live throughout the world and unfold in several parts, like a miniseries. At stake was the fate of twenty-three million Iraqis—though, as usual, the discussions had little to do with them. They would focus, as always, on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

  The world was divided. Representing the “coalition of the willing” was Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general, Vietnam veteran, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operation Desert Storm. He was also considered a credible contender for the presidency of the United States.

  Speaking most forcefully for the “peace camp” was a French aristocrat and poet known by his full name as Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin. A product of France’s elite Grandes Ecoles, de Villepin had risen through the ranks of France’s Foreign Service and served several years as the secretary general of Jacques Chirac’s presidential palace. He had never been exposed to the limelight before his appointment as minister of foreign affairs in May 2002. The author of a book extolling the achievements of Napoleon, he, like his American counterpart, was considered a future presidential contender.

  There were good reasons why de Villepin stole the show from the other Security Council members who opposed the war. Unlike Germany, France had a veto and could play a pivotal role in the decision-making process. Unlike Russia, France had participated in the Gulf War and was expected, ultimately, to come on board for this one. Unlike China, France was a democracy that could credibly claim to care about human rights. And unlike all of the above, France had a relationship with the United States that went back to America’s birth and included the gift of the Statue of Liberty.

  As I watched Powell and de Villepin clash in the UN Security Council in New York, I wondered how a bully from the Iraqi village of Tikrit had managed to cause such a deep rift between two of the world’s oldest democracies. Thanks in large part to the financial wealth he had gained from the Oil-for-Food program, Saddam had succeeded in applying the same old “divide and conquer” tactic to the international community as he had applied to tribal Iraq. And, incredibly, it paid off.

  The clash between France and the United States had been years in the making. I had seen the resentment between U.S. and French diplomats brew from inside the UN sanctions committee and realized that if it came to an all-out confrontation, it would get very ugly.

  For years, France and the United States had waged a battle for the moral high ground in public and a turf war for regional influence in private. The Oil-for-Food program had been a battleground on both fronts. France used to accuse the United States of being insensitive to the plight of Iraq’s population. The United States used to clobber France for enriching Saddam Hussein through trade. Both accusations were correct, of course. And that only served to further sour the atmosphere.

  France and the United States had led opposite policies toward Iraq for twelve years. While the United States did everything in its power to keep Iraq isolated, France reestablished diplomatic relations with Iraq and did nearly everything it could to gradually rehabilitate Saddam’s regime. Iraq rewarded France with big contracts through the Oil-for-Food program, especially when it felt the French government was lobbying sufficiently hard for its cause. France sold about 22 percent of the goods Iraq was buying and received some 15 percent of its underpriced oil allocations, with French Ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée receiving about $165,000 in illicit kickbacks. However, when Baghdad decided France had not done enough, it did not hesitate to find other trading partners. Somehow, this worked wonders on French policy-making.

  Iraq made its policy of awarding contracts in return for political favors absolutely clear in its public statements. This occasionally caused some embarrassment to France. After one incident in which the Iraqis released a statement berating France for its poor collaboration, I heard a bitter high-level French diplomat vent, “The Iraqis—they treat their friends like dogs!”

  Their friends?

  Partly as a punishment for insufficient French collaboration, Iraq reduced its wheat imports from France and awarded contracts to Australia instead. Oddly enough, Australia never became a major political backer of Saddam Hussein. They paid the kickbacks, of course: more than $200 million for the wheat alone. But still, usually the policies of a country conformed to Saddam’s interests, too. I once asked a man who had helped secure a mother lode of contracts for the Australian Wheat Board if they had come under any pressure to support Iraq politically.

  “Sure,” he said, with a big smile.

  “And?” I asked.

  “We just played stupid,” he said. “People seem to thi
nk Australians are stupid to begin with, you know, because of our accent. Whatever. . . .”

  When I repeated the Australian’s comment to a junior French diplomat, he shook his head and said, “You see? With us, it is the opposite. We are victims of our intelligence.”

  One reason the French diplomats allowed themselves to be treated “like dogs” by Saddam’s cronies was that, in France, major infrastructure-oriented firms are still partially owned by the state. The CEOs and the ministers work hand in hand. When politicians are out of power, they become consultants for large state-owned companies, and when they come back to power, they return the favor by helping these firms secure contracts. It’s rather like Dick Cheney and Halliburton, except for the fact that Halliburton is not technically owned by the U.S. government.

  The French oil giant TotalFinaElf began discussions about new oil development contracts with the Iraqi authorities as early as 1992, according to its own general director of production, Christophe de Margerie. In 1997 the company that is generally considered to be a state within the state in France signed exclusive contracts with the Iraqi authorities to develop the Nahr Omar oilfield in southern Iraq, which holds an estimated ten billion barrels of oil. Such deals were outside the scope of the Oil-for-Food program and were therefore meant to take effect only after the sanctions were lifted. In essence, France was banking on Saddam Hussein for the long term.