Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  If the UN Charter were applied domestically—say, to a village—then every head of household in that village would have the right to beat his wife (assuming a male dominates the household) and starve his children, and the society would not have the right to intervene. Only if a person attacked another family’s house could he be restrained, and even then he might be left in charge of his own family—as was the case in 1991, when Saddam was left as the ruler of Iraq.

  Knowing they stood no chance of selling the war to other members of the UN Security Council merely on the merits of overthrowing the Iraqi dictator, the United States and Britain went ahead and made a case for intervention based on the need to “disarm Saddam Hussein.”

  The case for disarmament was a tough one to make because most experts agreed that Iraq had fewer WMDs in 2003—if any—than it had in 1991. To complicate matters, there were no indications that Iraq was about to attack any of its neighbors (or the United States, for that matter). Arguing “legitimate defense” was out of the question. It was therefore crucial for the United States that Saddam still possessed WMDs.

  Since it would be very difficult without invading to prove that Saddam possessed WMDs, the United States and its allies found themselves in the awkward rhetorical position of having to invade Iraq to prove why it was necessary to invade Iraq (only to demonstrate that the invasion had, in fact, been unnecessary according to its own rationale). Such was the cost of making a case that didn’t make intuitive sense.

  The UN Security Council found itself transformed into a strange version of a “world court” with fifteen divided judges. Nobody could agree on what would actually constitute a smoking gun. When Colin Powell played an intercept of an Iraqi military leader ordering chemical weapons destroyed, he felt confident he had provided solid evidence for his case. In the intercept, two Iraqi commanders had the following exchange:

  Commander 1: Remove, Remove!

  Commander 2: Got it.

  Commander 1: Nerve agents! Nerve agents! Wherever it comes up. . . .

  Commander 2: Got it!

  Commander 1: Wherever it comes up! . . .

  Commander 2: Got it!

  Was this proof that Saddam’s military possessed nerve agents? Not quite. But it showed that if it did possess nerve agents, it was clearly trying to get rid of them.

  Meanwhile, the news channels, always in need of images to match their words, kept showing footage of Saddam dressed (fittingly) as Al Capone and shooting a gun in the air from the balcony of one of his palaces. I thought the news editors made an important point by superimposing that image on the smoking gun debate. The problem was not with Iraq’s guns but with the mad-man in charge of them—a man who had done far more damage using conventional weapons than with WMDs.

  What should have been a moral debate about whether to go to war to topple the Iraqi regime was replaced by an idiotic reality show—featuring weapons experts driving around Iraq in convoys of Toyota Land Cruisers looking for hidden weapons. This led to a number of awkward situations. In one instance, the inspectors were stalled at the entrance to a warehouse because nobody could find the key to the front door. Panic ensued. Were the Iraqis failing to collaborate? Since there was a camera crew along for the ride, the inspectors had to look tough—so they broke down the door and stepped into the little warehouse, a few minutes before the Iraqi chicken farmer who owned it arrived with the key. “What have you done to my door?” he asked. The inspectors found nothing.

  The incident I found most revealing did not involve weapons of mass destruction in any way. It involved an Iraqi civilian. On January 25, 2003, an Iraqi man stopped a UN-marked Land Cruiser right outside the UN compound in Baghdad, pleading, “Save me! Save me!” According to a CNN report of the incident, the unarmed man then boarded the UN car and refused to get out.

  “Appearing agitated and frightened, the young man, with a closely trimmed beard and a mustache, sat inside the white UN-marked SUV for 10 minutes,” the Associated Press reported. Then, according to CNN, “an Iraqi guard struggled to pull him out, while an unfazed UN inspector watched from the passenger seat.”

  As the Iraqi guard struggled to pull him out, the man shouted, “I am unjustly treated! I am unjustly treated!”

  Clearly, the Iraqi man was assuming that the UN cared.

  CNN had no idea how to spin the incident. Why would a random Iraqi who was being unjustly treated seek refuge with the United Nations? What did it have to do with Iraq’s WMDs? Correspondent Nic Robertson tried to tie the incident in with the story of the day, involving the (non-happening) interviews with Iraqi scientists. It didn’t occur to anybody that the drama we got to watch on the nightly news was far more relevant to Iraq’s condition than any development on the weapons inspections front.

  “Then,” according to the CNN report, “UN security men arrived, and they and the Iraqi police carried the man by his feet and arms into the fenced compound . . . and turned him over to Iraqi authorities.” And the report went on about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

  The man was never heard from again. This, in a nutshell, was the story of Iraq and the international community. We were so self-centered, so concerned with threats against our own security, that we had become completely desensitized to the fate of ordinary Iraqis. All we cared about was the weapons. While I disliked this narrow focus, I also resented those who dismissed the existence of such weapons to begin with. After watching the inspectors work from up close for all these years, I was pretty convinced Saddam was hiding something from the UN.

  In his first postwar visit to a U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: where are the weapons of mass destruction? According to Time magazine, he first turned to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, and asked, “Are you in charge of finding WMD?” Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then asked the question to his military commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn’t his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, “So who is in charge of finding WMD?” After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington.

  “Who?” asked Bush.

  The lack of WMDs had become a political hot potato, and nobody in the administration wanted to be the one to break the bad news to the commander in chief.

  One of the many mistakes the Bush administration made in the run-up to the war was to attack the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, as a means to pressure him into strengthening the case for war. Blix was a straight shooter. He reported to the UN Security Council exactly what he saw. I had met him at a dinner once before he was thrown into the limelight, and he had come across as a very reasonable man who, unlike some of our colleagues at the UN, had no illusions about the regime of Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s cooperation was imperfect, and that is how he presented it to the Security Council. When asked if the United States would find WMDs in Iraq, Blix responded, “That is the $64 billion question,” noting also that the inspections had cost merely $64 million.

  Of course, that wasn’t counting the cost of positioning troops on Iraq’s borders, which was why the inspectors were allowed back into Iraq in the first place. But still, if the war was really about disarmament, the Swede had a point. Then, when it grew increasingly clear that the United States had not found any WMDs in Iraq, Blix cracked: “It is somewhat fascinating to me that you can have 100 percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction [being in Iraq] and zero percent certainty about where they are.”

  Ultimately, President Bush was forced to call on former UN weapons inspector David Kay to continue the search where Hans Blix left off. (Blix, an old man who loves his wife more than the spotlight, retired without controversy in June 2003.) Kay eventually reported that Iraq had indeed been in violation of the cease-fire resolution but that he could find no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. It was a total, unmitigated fiasco.

/>   The French, the Russians, and the Germans were laughing now. But they wouldn’t be laughing for long.

  The CIA report that finally admitted finding no WMDs in Iraq also unearthed another interesting fact—evidence of major corruption in the UN Oil-for-Food program. The effort to divert the public’s attention was shamelessly transparent. But at least the United States and Britain would not run out of “smoking guns” this time. Saddam Hussein had left plenty of evidence around to implicate his former business partners.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 25

  There Will Be Blood

  In a document that would become known as the Downing Street Memo, which contained the minutes of a top-secret briefing, Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, had warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that the United States was ill prepared for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. He decried the absence of a coherent plan of action for the post-Saddam transition. While the United States had prepared for humanitarian emergencies that might require an influx of food or medicine, the wider, forward-looking planning process had fallen hostage to a bitter turf war between the Pentagon, on the one hand, and a loose alliance including the State Department and the CIA, on the other. While each side wrestled for budgets and power, the first victims, as usual, would be the Iraqi people.

  During the war itself, France’s Dominique de Villepin refused to comment when a journalist from the Telegraph asked him whether he hoped American and British forces would win. “I’m not going to answer,” he replied angrily, saying he had already expressed himself on the subject. He had previously said that he hoped for “a swift conclusion” to the war, but that did not exactly answer the question of which side he hoped would win. De Villepin was not the only one in France reluctant to support the coalition. A poll conducted for the daily Le Monde found that one-third of the French people surveyed answered no when asked whether “deep down” they wished for a victory of the U.S. and British forces. Only half of the French people surveyed hoped the coalition would win.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Fox News kept showing footage of average Joe Americans pouring French wine down the gutter. One Congressman decreed that the fries sold in Capitol Hill cafeterias should be renamed Freedom Fries (which didn’t matter much to the French, since French fries were actually invented by Belgians, and it was probably a testament to some Americans’ poor sense of geography that the fries ended up being called French in the first place). Another grandstanding Congressional bill would let families of veterans killed in action on French soil in the course of the twentieth century have their relatives repatriated and reburied in the United States.

  Amid all this bitterness, the international community had a nation to rebuild. And the brawl that preceded the war left the international community too divided to put together a coherent mandate for the UN after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

  All sides initially urged the UN to return to Iraq, but for radically opposite reasons. France wanted a speedy end to the U.S. occupation. The United States wanted the UN to legitimize its occupation. The Sunnis of Iraq hoped that a UN intervention would offset the growing power of Shiite and Kurdish leaders. And the latter hoped that a token UN presence might persuade France, Germany, and others to join the reconstruction effort.

  Without a coherent mandate, the UN found itself projected into a conflict where it would take hits from all sides.

  The first blow would come from the Sunni terrorists, the second blow would come from Shiites and Kurds on the Iraqi Governing Council, and the third blow would come from powerful lawmakers and opinion-makers in the United States. The third act of this collective tragedy would force me into a role I had never envisaged for myself.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Road to Hell

  “I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel.”

  CAPTAIN SMITH, commander of the Titanic

  On the afternoon of August 19, 2003, Pasha stepped out of his office at the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad to light up a Cohiba. He had recently pledged to lay off the puffers, but the sound of distant gunfire, low-flying helicopters, and the general sense of chaos that prevailed in Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion chipped away at everyone’s nerves nonstop. Pasha could use a little nicotine break.

  A few hundred yards away, a flatbed truck packed with more than 2,000 pounds of high-grade explosives was rolling toward the UN building.

  It was a sunny afternoon. Reporters were trickling in from the parking lot to attend a press briefing on the humanitarian situation in Iraq. A few days earlier, on August 14, the UN Security Council had passed Resolution 1500, establishing the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) under the leadership of Kofi Annan’s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

  While Pasha stepped out for a smoke, Vieira de Mello was in his office meeting with a human rights lawyer. A native of Brazil, Vieira de Mello had a stellar reputation for navigating delicate UN missions successfully and for putting the interests of civilians first. He had helped manage East Timor’s transition to democracy after it emerged from decades of brutal rule by Indonesia. As the man in charge of mine clearance in Cambodia and in the Balkans in the early 1990s, and as a leader in handling central Africa’s refugee crises later in that decade, he had set new standards for UN management. In 2002 he was named UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. By the time of the Iraq War, he appeared to be the UN’s most able and widely respected manager; so when it came time to pick a leader who would help Iraq get back on its feet, all eyes naturally turned to him.

  Vieira de Mello had been reluctant to take the job. In e-mail exchanges with colleagues, he had complained that the UN’s mission was unclear. But pleas from President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, and Kofi Annan’s promise to limit his tour of duty to four months, finally persuaded him to take the job, ill defined as it was.

  The mandate had been written in haste. Christer, my former director, had asked me for input at the time. I had suggested we propose focused objectives we knew we could deliver on. The key, as I saw it, was to help oversee upcoming elections—something the UN (and Vieira de Mello in particular) had experience with. Apart from that, I thought we’d be busy enough coordinating international aid efforts while Iraq underwent what looked like an increasingly violent transition.

  The Security Council saw things differently. These were the days when President Bush was declaring “mission accomplished,” even as it was becoming clear to America’s military commanders that Iraq was growing increasingly unstable by the day. For France and Russia, the solution to Iraq’s ills, including the spread of terrorism throughout that country, lay in ending the occupation immediately. With this objective in mind they piled a wide range of responsibilities on Vieira de Mello’s shoulders, hoping this would encourage the United States to disengage. They knew they would have far more influence over Iraqi politics if the UN took center stage in managing postwar Iraq. They had signed billions of dollars’ worth of contracts through the Oil-for-Food program and didn’t want to lose those. Ironically, therefore, they were suddenly not as keen to lift the sanctions, as that move might put their business at risk. Russia was arguing that Iraq had to be “certified” clear of WMDs before sanctions could be lifted. This pushed the Bush administration into a corner. As long as inspectors were roaming the country, the United States didn’t have to admit how flawed its prewar intelligence had been.

  In addition, Saddam’s government had incurred astronomical debt. Iraq owed France and Germany $5 billion each and Russia $12 billion. Much of these loans had been granted in return for future oil exploration rights. France and Russia didn’t want Paul Bremer and the newly established Coalition Provisional Authority messing with the business they had lined up during the Saddam era.

  The State Department saw no harm in piling up a range of unrealistic mission objectives on the United Nations. If anything, one diplomat confided, they would have somewhere to lay blame if things went wr
ong.

  As I went about the process of reenlisting with the UN, I had the familiar feeling that the international community once again saw Iraq as a cake to be divided among the great powers. I received e-mails about international conferences where contractors advertised the opportunity to “make a killing” in Iraq.

  A killing would indeed be made, only in a far more literal sense than most outsiders had imagined. A number of observers had warned about the possible spread of terrorism in postwar Iraq. But the violence that stood to be unleashed would dwarf their worst predictions.

  As the United Nations reentered Iraq, the organization’s members had yet to agree on an official definition for “terrorism.” That fact alone should have dissuaded me from going back to Iraq with the UN. Yet I could not get myself to stop caring about the country that had defined much of my academic and professional life thus far. I had written about Iraq for my honors thesis at Brown University, assisted in covering Security Council decisions on Iraq while at CNN, and worked for more than three years for the UN operation that was Iraq’s main lifeline to the outside world. I had since written about the conflict for a variety of newspapers, often warning of the difficulties we might face if the international community set out to address Iraq’s deep-rooted fault lines before tending to its own stark divisions.

  In many ways, I had come of age with the Iraq conflict, and it seemed only natural that I should contribute my services at this most critical stage. Despite Vieira de Mello’s vast and muddy mandate (which included everything from promoting economic reconstruction, human rights, judicial reform, and the return of refugees to reestablishing Iraq’s looted cultural sites), he was able to articulate the essence of his mission in words that resonated with me. Speaking to reporters on the day of his nomination in May, he said, “Iraqi society is rich, and that richness has been suppressed brutally for the past twenty-four years.” Vieira de Mello had not been a supporter of the war; but unlike many others within the UN, he saw the need to take the situation from there and felt confident that he would be able to liaise with American and Iraqi leaders and bring in more support from European powers. He had a proven ability to interact productively with the military. All sides trusted him to put his heart into the task of unifying the international community and defending the interests of Iraq’s civilians.