Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  Originally touted as a major diplomatic victory for the United States, Resolution 1441 turned out to be a trap for the Bush administration in general and for Powell in particular. Resolution 1441 gave Saddam one last chance to submit to UN weapons inspections. Of course, neither France nor the United States really cared about the UN weapons inspections. France never had, and the United States no longer did now that it was prepared to go to war. In passing the resolution, the United States thought it was setting a trap for Saddam. Powell thought de Villepin had seen him when he went wink, wink, as together they drafted a resolution that was supposed to be Saddam’s “last chance to come clean.” Powell was clearly counting on France to vote for a “use of force resolution” at the end of that process. What he did not realize was that his “friend” envisaged a road with no end.

  Resolution 1441 threatened that if Saddam Hussein failed to get anything less than an A+ from the UN inspectors, there would be “serious consequences.” America understood “serious consequences” to mean that Saddam would be deposed. France understood “serious consequences” to mean that the United Nations would pass another resolution. In the end, the “serious consequences” turned out to mean a historic divorce between France and the United States, and a severely devalued UN.

  The United States had gone to the United Nations in search of legitimacy and, paradoxically, had ended up with less legitimacy at the end of the process than it had at the beginning. France could have spared its “ally” the humiliation. When Clinton decided to bomb Milosevic to stop him from “cleansing” Kosovo of its Albanian population, he sidestepped the UN altogether. What simplified his choice was the fact that Moscow had been courteous enough to inform him that it would under no circumstance support a UN resolution authorizing force against its “Slavic brothers.” Had France been a friend of the United States, it would have made it plain at the beginning of the process that it would oppose any “use of force” resolution. When push came to shove, in March 2003, France asked for another sixty days, then another thirty days. Why? Because “all diplomatic means had to be exhausted.” Bush was exhausted already and was complaining of having to sit through the “rerun of a bad movie.”

  Then, finally, de Villepin said it: “We won’t let a resolution that can open the way to war pass in the UN Security Council.”

  U.S. diplomats simply couldn’t believe it. Before de Villepin’s diplomatic ambush, most of the U.S. political establishment thought they had France all figured out. Hawks and doves alike believed France would be a pain until the very last minute and then, when the chips were down, come on board—if not with a vote of support for the U.S. intervention, then at a minimum with an abstention. That belief was so deeply rooted in Washington’s way of thinking that, at the eleventh hour, the United States felt obliged to repeat its final boarding call. As U.S. Special Operations troops began infiltrating Iraq through Kurdistan, an exasperated President Bush reiterated publicly that the time had come for all countries to “show their cards.”

  In response, Dominique de Villepin flew to Africa in March 2003 to lobby Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea, all of whom had temporary seats on the fifteen-member Security Council, to vote against the final draft resolution co-sponsored by the United States, Britain, and Spain.

  As a permanent member of the Security Council, France had veto power. If it wanted to stop a resolution from passing, all it had to do was use it, and the resolution was dead. So why did de Villepin go thousands of miles out of his way to persuade African nations to vote against it? What was at stake in this battle for world sympathy: the future of the Iraqi people or France’s standing in the world?

  France’s bid to restrain the American Gulliver using UN resolutions as rope was doomed from the outset. The Clinton administration had initiated military action without UN authorization in Kosovo and in Iraq. The U.S. Congress had voted to empower Bush to declare war, and the latter had made it clear that he would proceed without the explicit blessing of the world body.

  In the end, the United States and Britain decided not to seek a vote. No vote was better than one against war. Dominique de Villepin had won without a showdown. But what had he really won? His diplomatic zeal did not avert a war. And insofar as France aimed to contend for the title of “champion” on international law, its diplomats would run into a bit of a snag once Iraqi journalists pulled certain files from Saddam’s Oil Ministry. The leaders of Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea breathed a sigh of relief. Flattered as they were by all the sudden attention from France and the United States, they didn’t have an iota of interest in Iraq and resented being asked to choose sides in a Franco-American divorce.

  “You know,” said one African diplomat, “this is not a good situation for us. It is not a good situation for France or America either. And clearly, this is not good for the UN. The only winner here is Saddam. He has divided his enemies on the eve of war. He is the greatest diplomat of them all.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Weapons of Mass Distraction

  “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably [also] in Tennessee—that says, Fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me twice . . . ah . . . you can’t get fooled again!”

  PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

  What pained me most about the diplomatic debacle that preceded the Iraq War was that it did not even occur for the right reasons. The debate about whether to go to war “for disarmament” was simply wrong. There was a real argument to be had about the value of confronting Saddam Hussein as part of the war on terror and the value of transforming enemies into friends by exporting democracy. Unfortunately, that conversation did not begin in earnest until after the Iraq War.

  Driven by the CIA’s forecast of a “slam dunk” on the WMD front, America had failed to prepare its troops and its public for the enormously difficult, bloody, and expensive challenge that lay ahead.

  The exclusive focus on Saddam’s alleged WMDs was a harmful distraction from the human dimension of the conflict, which should have been at the forefront of the Security Council’s agenda right from the beginning in 1991.

  Regardless of what the Security Council was doing, I felt that the UN’s staff should be hard at work preparing for the aftermath of a possible war. In the late winter of 2003, as the war seemed increasingly inevitable, I was eager to get back to work at the United Nations to help out with Iraq, but the process of my recruitment was taking forever. In early March my former (and perhaps future) director informed me that my recruitment papers were stuck in Pasha’s office, so I went to pay the under secretary general a visit to find out what the problem was.

  I found Pasha watching CNN behind his desk and puffing on a cigar. He eyed me suspiciously at first as I stood at the door of his office. Then he put on his joking face and invited me in. He knew the reason for my visit, but instead of leveling with me he spent half an hour accusing his director (my former and future boss) of being a two-faced bastard and a liar. Clearly, Cindy’s departure hadn’t changed much. Pasha and Christer were still not on speaking terms. At some point in his ramble, Pasha noticed that I was getting ready to leave, so he paused for a beat.

  “I guess you didn’t come here to hear about this,” he said, somewhat apologetically.

  I seized on this last opportunity to have a relevant conversation.

  “This is going to be about nation-building,” I said. “What role is the UN going to play? We need to come up with options—a plan. Something the Security Council can use.”

  I think I lost Pasha there for a minute, because he completely changed the subject.

  “Those bozos want a facking TV, can you believe it?” Pasha said. It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, but I remembered hearing that my director had submitted a request to purchase a TV for his office so that he could follow the latest developments as they happened. It seemed to me a perfectly legitimate request, but Pasha had refused to approve it, arguing that he would not “spend Iraqi money�
�� just so his director could “sit around and watch TV all day.”

  At that moment I wished my girlfriend had hit me on the head with a frying pan rather than let me go back to the United Nations. The world was going to war, and these guys were fighting over a TV set. I tried to remind myself that the UN would most likely have to start a whole new operation after the war and that it was going to be headed by a different team. A well-informed source in Washington had mentioned to me that Sergio Vieira de Mello was being considered for the job. Sergio had a stellar reputation both as a diplomat and as a manager. My plan was to get back into the system and then join his group as soon as it was set up.

  “You’re thinking far ahead,” Pasha said, nodding pensively. “All right. I’ll see what I can do,” he said finally.

  Then, perhaps because he awoke to the contradiction of having his own TV turned on while blasting his director for wanting one too, Pasha turned off CNN.

  “Facking UNMOVIC! This is all a big show! They’ll never find any facking smoking guns!” said Pasha.

  There I thought he had a point. The whole UN system was paralyzed by the search for weapons of mass destruction. Everything seemed to hinge on whether UNMOVIC stumbled upon some type of evidence that Saddam had kept weapons hidden from the UN. To their credit, the UN arms inspectors did find a few things, like long-range missiles and old shells that could have been used to spread blister agents. To the “coalition of the willing,” it was proof that war was necessary. To the “peace camp,” it was proof that the “inspections were working” and that there was no need to use force. It was a vicious circle, and a distracting one at that.

  An honest debate between France and the United States on the subject of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction ought to have begun with a mea culpa from both sides.

  Both France and the United States had looked away when Saddam Hussein first used poison gas in the early 1980s, during Iraq’s war with Iran. France continued to sell major weapons to Iraq thereafter. As for the United States, it sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message to the Iraqi government. According to documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, Rumsfeld told the Iraqi dictator that public U.S. criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington’s attempts to forge a better relationship with Baghdad. Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s special Middle East envoy, was given a brief by Secretary of State George Shultz that urged him to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that previous U.S. statements on chemical weapons “were made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of . . . chemical weapons, wherever it occurs,” and that the U.S. desire “to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing,” remained “undiminished.” “This message bears reinforcing during your discussions,” Rumsfeld was instructed. Saddam got the message loud and clear and later used chemical weapons again to exterminate the Kurds.

  Of course, the prize for helping Iraq with its WMD programs has to go to France, and to Jacques Chirac in particular. It was he who, in the late 1970s, approved the sale of a seventy-megawatt, uranium-powered nuclear reactor to Saddam.

  Experts all concur that, had Israel not destroyed the nuclear reactor in a 1981 air raid, Iraq would have acquired nuclear weapons before 1990. In other words, “Jacques’s Iraq” would have been a nuclear power by the time of its invasion of Kuwait. If Saddam had nuclear weapons back then, Kuwait would likely have remained the “nineteenth province of Iraq,” as he initially called it, and Saudi Arabia might easily have become its twentieth. Without U.S. military protection, places like the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, and Qatar might easily have fallen under Saddam’s control as well. Would the West have risked nuclear war to defend them?

  Short of intervening militarily and putting millions of lives at risk of irradiation, the international community would have been forced to contend with a nuclear Iraq controlling a majority of the world’s proven oil reserves and headed by a psychopath.

  Why did Jacques Chirac sell a nuclear reactor to the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein?

  Trust Christiane Amanpour to get straight to the point, in an exclusive interview with Jacques Chirac:

  Amanpour: There have been consistent allegations that Saddam Hussein put money into one of your electoral campaigns. How do you respond to that?

  Chirac: [laughter] It’s preposterous, really. Anything can be said about anyone. As we say in French, “The taller the tale, the more likely people will believe in it.”

  Speaking of tall tales: France argued that the “Osirak” nuclear reactor it sold to Saddam was for civilian purposes. Even Saddam couldn’t keep up that lie.

  On September 30, 1980, in the opening days of the Iran-Iraq war, an Iranian aircraft attacked, and lightly damaged, the Osirak facility. In response, the official Iraqi news agency issued the following statement: “The Iranian people should not fear the Iraqi nuclear reactor, which is not intended to be used against Iran, but against the Zionist entity.”

  The “civilian purposes” of Iraq’s nuclear program were clear: massive Israeli civilian casualties. But Chirac never expressed any regrets about the matter. As late as March 2003, when Amanpour gave him the chance to express regret, he couldn’t get the word “sorry” out of his mouth.

  Amanpour: A lot of people call [Osirak] “O-Chirac,” as you know. In retrospect, do you regret that it was destroyed, given that it could have been used to form nuclear weapons?

  Chirac: Well, this reactor was a civilian reactor. But in those days, all of the major democracies—all of them, each and every one of them—had contacts and trade and exchanges with Iraq, including on weapons.

  No regrets. Everybody was doing it! Well, not quite. When President Mitterrand was approached to rebuild the Iraqi reactor, after Israel had destroyed it, he refused.

  At the time of the bombing, France’s condemnation of Israel was particularly vociferous. Chirac called the Israeli ambassador into his office and told him he was representing a band of “criminals.” Even the United States condemned Israel at the time for “violating Iraqi sovereignty,” though by the time of the Gulf War, the U.S. government had reversed itself and expressed relief that Israel had destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

  In subsequent years, Saddam Hussein poured more than $10 billion into rebuilding Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, only to miscalculate once again by invading Kuwait before actually acquiring the bomb. According to a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, by 1990 Iraq had reached a stage where it could very soon start producing two nuclear bombs per year. Had it not been for Desert Storm, “Iraq could have accumulated a nuclear stockpile of a dozen or more weapons by the end of the decade.”

  Once they set foot in Iraq in 1991, UN weapons inspectors were able to corroborate that Iraq had been far more advanced than Western intelligence agencies had thought. Saddam had successfully disseminated his nuclear facilities throughout the country and cobbled together a program that could have produced a nuclear device sometime in the 1990s. This finding was not based on iffy intelligence reports. It was based on firsthand inspections conducted in the initial months after Desert Storm, when Saddam’s regime was at its most fragile. During that time, the UN weapons inspectors destroyed more Iraqi WMDs than had been destroyed by bombings during the war itself. As late as 2005, UN reports reconfirmed this. In report S/1005/351, UNSCOM’s successor, UNMOVIC, confirmed that

  in 1991, Iraq declared that it had carried out laboratory research on [the chemical nerve agent] VX gas. By 1995, UNSCOM uncovered evidence that the scope of Iraq’s activities on VX was much broader. Consequently, in 1996 Iraq declared the production of 3.9 metric tons of VX, the production of 60 metric tons of key VX precursors and the acquisition of some 650 metric tons of other precursors for the production of VX. Iraq also acknowledged that it had decided to conceal various aspects of its VX activities from UNSCOM.

  Saddam’s earlier subterfuges
were not in question. Ironically, he may have been so efficient in his pursuit of the ultimate weapon that the intelligence community would never again underestimate his ability to reconstitute his WMD program. If anything, the community ended up overestimating it in the run-up to the Iraq War. Regardless of intelligence estimates (which are uncertain by nature), it was a mistake for the United States to present the war against Saddam as one waged for “disarmament.”

  Washington’s main objective was always regime change, defined as the temporary administration of Iraq by the United States, the reconstruction of its economy, and the stabilization of its tribal feuds with a view to building a democratic and secure Iraq. The case for doing all that may not have sold well in sound bites, but it would have been honest. And it would have forced a discussion of the future management of Iraq’s transition—something the UN Security Council should have been seized with long before the beginning of hostilities.

  Though it came late, Bush did eventually lay out a positive vision for the liberation and reconstruction of Iraq, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on February 27, 2003. “The nation of Iraq,” said Bush, “with its proud heritage, abundant resources, and skilled and educated people, is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.” He added that America was preparing for such a transition by making plans to meet basic humanitarian needs. “We will provide medicine for the sick,” he said. And he promised to keep running the 50,000 food distribution centers set up under the Oil-for-Food program.

  But this was just one month before the war. By that time the argument for disarmament had already taken hold in the minds of so many people that Bush’s “vision speech” left many observers deeply skeptical of his administration’s ability to make good on its promises. Besides, the UN Security Council completely ignored Bush’s words, because the UN Charter does not consider freedom and human rights relevant to authorizing the use of force. According to the UN Charter, force can be used only in situations of legitimate defense or as authorized by the UN Security Council under Article 42, to confront threats to international peace and security.