Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  Who was I becoming? The question lingered in my mind for as long as it could, despite my devout attempts to clear my head and concentrate on the landscape. If Kurdistan became stable enough to attract tourism one day, it would have just about every variety of climate to offer. The day before, we had been in a lush, green, mountainous area. Now we were in flat desert terrain, heading for some soft Tuscany-like hills that promised yet another variety of climate. I yearned for cooler air. Unfortunately, our convoy made an abrupt turn and headed for what looked like a very ugly fort.

  We stopped for lunch at a former military prison, which the deminers were now using as a forward operating base. We were given sandwiches that had sand in them and, to drink, some Iraqi version of Tang. After spitting out the sand, using the Tang as mouthwash, we all sat there in silence for a bit, waiting to see if we were about to get sick or what, before resuming our voyage. The courtyard of the prison camp was a perfect place to hang oneself.

  I fantasized about getting home. In forty-eight hours, I’d be back in New York. I could be sitting at Pastis, eating a delicious steak au poivre and enjoying a nice glass of Bordeaux in sexy company. . . .

  Pasha interrupted my mouth-watering daydream.

  “So, Kid, I’ve decided to leave you here in Iraq for a few months.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Halliday needs help writing the report.”

  My face decomposed, and my throat grew tight.

  “But . . . ah . . .”

  “Ha! You should see your face!” Pasha slapped my cheek and laughed some more before turning serious again. “Give me a facking cigarette. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  That was not funny.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 12

  The Baghdad Diet

  UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS,

  NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER 1997

  “How did you lose all that weight?” a curious colleague asked upon my return from Iraq. We were having lunch at the best cafeteria in New York, on the ground floor of the UN Secretariat building, speaking in half-hushed voices for fear that a group of interns might catch us in the act of having a male-diet talk. My friend had tried the Zone diet and the “eat all you want but only once a day” diet, and had recently abandoned the Atkins™ diet, on which he had gained five pounds and acquired the gift of high blood pressure. He now exercised three times a week, never cooked with butter, forced broccoli down his throat at lunch, and had low-fat sugar-free frozen yogurt for dinner. Two weeks of that and he had lost only two miserable pounds.

  “You should try the Baghdad diet,” I said.

  I had lost a good fifteen pounds in Iraq.

  “Really? How does it work?”

  I advised my colleague that he might achieve similar results if he used laxatives irresponsibly. The weight I had lost was due to my stomach’s stubborn refusal to cooperate with the bacteria found in most foods available in Iraq. Oh, well. At least I had gained a clear firsthand understanding of how our UN sanctions affected that country’s sanitary standards.

  If one thing was abundantly clear from our first mission to Iraq, it was that the population needed more, better-quality food, and more effective and clean means to distribute it. The UN ration consisted of a bucket of flour, some rice, some cooking oil, some chickpeas, salt, tea, sugar, powdered milk, and soap. We called it the “food basket,” as if it was a gift from Citarella. But in reality Iraqis had to queue for hours with old plastic containers to get their monthly grub. There were more than three thousand distribution centers around the country, and the government required people in line to show ID, because there were no second servings.

  With that, we had the nerve to send our “UN observers” out to the villages to ask people how they felt about the menu. It would have been a death mission were it not for the Iraqi government minders who accompanied them on every trip.

  Who in this world would want the UN to decide what they get to eat? Those who didn’t throw stones at our white SUVs, or insult our observers, informed us that they wouldn’t mind more variety in their diet. As for quality, they would plead with us for servings of chickpeas that didn’t contain stones in them, soap that didn’t create rashes, and oil that didn’t taste like petrol.

  The Iraqi government was in charge of contracting for these commodities, so the UN was not in a position to affect the quality of the food that was ordered. Saddam Hussein consistently spent as little as possible on food and as much as possible on industrial goods that might be diverted to his security apparatus. From a technical standpoint, all the food that was distributed to Iraq’s civilians had been declared fit for human consumption by the Iraqi authorities. But according to the consumers, it was fit for dogs. Personally, I wouldn’t wish to be the owner of a dog afflicted with the condition I developed in Iraq.

  The unsafe drinking water, mixed with the powdered milk, provoked life-threatening diarrhea in young children. There was an urgent need to pump more money into the water sector. And the electricity sector. And the agricultural sector. And the transportation sector. The “food basket” often lacked key ingredients, because there were not enough trucks to transport the food or because the truckers weren’t getting paid by the government—or, as we later learned, because the trucks had been repainted green and were pulling cannons for Iraq’s army.

  In the case of severely malnourished children, staple foods were not sufficient to bring them back to health. They needed special medical care and high-protein foods with vitamin supplements in order to survive. So we’d have to think of equipping hospitals with special child-nutrition units. But the challenges quickly compounded as we considered them in detail. For example, most hospitals did not even have reliable electricity and couldn’t store certain foods and medicines, so even when we focused narrowly on saving malnourished kids, we were also forced to consider wider challenges, like how to repair Iraq’s bombed-out electrical grid, its water supply, and so on.

  Iraq didn’t need an Oil-for-Food program. It needed an Oil-for-Everything-Except Weapons program. But of course, Iraq’s needs were one thing. What mattered, in the final analysis, was what the UN Security Council would allow through. Our ability to get more goods into Iraq was linked to progress on the weapons front. The UN inspectors continued to make discoveries that were far from reassuring to Western powers. UNSCOM had recently reported that it had uncovered the existence of an active “offensive biological warfare programme.” In addition, UNSCOM inspectors had found samples and traces of the chemical nerve agent VX and other advanced chemical weapons capabilities; they had also dismantled Iraq’s indigenous production of long-range-missile engines. Following these discoveries, UNSCOM directed and supervised the destruction or dismantling of several facilities and large quantities of equipment used to produce chemical and biological weapons as well as proscribed long-range missiles.

  If the U.S. Army had found only half as many WMD materials when it eventually invaded Iraq, the Bush administration might have preserved a modicum of credibility. Ironically, it turned out that UNSCOM had done a better job than most observers ever expected. Saddam probably also got rid of any and all WMD-related materials that remained unaccounted for before the war—which may explain why the man kept laughing every time his face appeared on television. But back in 1998, he wasn’t laughing as much. His grip on power had been weakened, and his only chance of strengthening his regime again was to abuse our humanitarian program and keep the world guessing about his potential WMD capacity, should any of his neighbors or his own people be tempted to repay him for the harm he had caused them in the past. Of course, we will never know the inner workings of the dictator’s mind, but back in 1998, as we considered how to improve our humanitarian operation, UNSCOM and Baghdad were averaging a new crisis every couple of months. So if we wanted the Security Council to allow more goods into Iraq, we would need to make a convincing pitch on behalf of the Iraqi people.

  Job number one was to establish what the humanitarian
needs of the Iraqi people were. This assumed we could come up with a clear definition of what constituted a “humanitarian need,” as opposed to any other needs humans have as they struggle to make their way through life and provide for their offspring. Job number two was to assure the members of the Security Council that they could let us meet those needs without screwing up their sanctions against Saddam. This, of course, was a highly unrealistic proposition.

  Thus began the process of designing a new UN humanitarian program for Iraq. The Security Council drafts its laws based on reports presented by the UN Secretariat. So it is rather critical that those reports be clear and factually correct, and that they propose options that might help the Security Council adopt “resolutions” that result in concrete, helpful action.

  The laws passed by the Security Council are called “resolutions” perhaps in part to preempt the public from questioning that body’s actual resolve in dealing with certain problems. Every year it adopts dozens of such “resolutions,” and it may be said that the institution’s members are about as good at following through on their resolutions as most people are at sticking to their own New Year’s resolutions come February.

  In order to consider resolutions, the Security Council must be “seized” with a particular matter. To seize the ambassadors’ attention, the UN Secretariat submits reports about given situations with suggestions that might, if Security Council members can agree, be adopted into laws that are supposed to be binding on all states.

  Now, how do such reports, which are also written by committee, come to life inside an organization riddled with internal turf wars, petty office politics, dramatic personal rivalries, and, in our case, a shameless competition for control over more money than the UN system had ever seen?

  It was easy to see how the process might quickly degenerate. So I was somewhat relieved when I was informed that all sides of our UN operation had agreed to approach the drafting process in a “scientific” manner. Science implies orderly procedures, factual assumptions, and technical method.

  The technical term for what we were doing was a “bottom-up review” of Iraq’s humanitarian needs, and it was highly scientific indeed, as the episode concerning the proposed inclusion of canned cheese in the Iraqi people’s diet illustrates.

  The idea had come from Denis Halliday, who, quite justifiably, had concluded that the Iraqi people needed more animal protein. East Village nutritionists will argue that “you can find all the proteins you need in soy,” but an Iraqi mother cooking for her family wouldn’t know what to do with soy. And when dealing with stunted, underweight children, the best way to help them is actually to provide them with nutrients rich in animal protein and calcium. The problem, of course, was that the powdered milk we were providing was more dangerous than helpful when mixed with bad water. Other forms of animal protein are very expensive and need to be transported and stored in a cold chain, which Iraq did not have the electricity to maintain. Canned cheese, though an acquired taste, did not require refrigeration and provided a cheaper source of protein than meat or fish.

  Halliday therefore made a proposal for a multimillion-dollar purchase of canned cheese. Fifteen minutes after we had submitted the proposal to Pasha for clearance, I heard a ruckus in his office. I ran over to check if he was all right.

  “Facking Halliday!” said Pasha, holding up Halliday’s fax in one hand and slapping it with the other.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Why da fack do they need all this canned cheese?” he thundered.

  “Um . . . protein, sir?”

  “Protein my ass! Who eats cheese out of a can? Show me one facking Iraqi who’ll eat cheese out of a can!”

  As we didn’t have such a “facking Iraqi” on hand to give us his opinion on the matter, out went the canned cheese. It soon became evident that Pasha and Halliday had radically different views as to what constituted a “bottom-up review” of Iraq’s humanitarian needs. In devising his proposals with nutrition experts in the field, Halliday had not foreseen that some of the ideas would be shot down in New York with comments like “protein my ass.”

  From the onset of the exercise, Pasha had been reticent about the whole “bottom-up” thing. “It’s my ass on the line,” he would insist. “Not Halliday’s! So I’ll tell you where he can shove his bottom-up review . . .”

  Say no more, Pasha . . . say no . . .

  “Up his bottom!”

  After the canned cheese episode, Pasha took to calling Halliday’s report the “Up-the-Bottom” review rather than the bottom-up review. The new name of the report became such common usage that I worried Pasha might mistakenly use the wrong term when addressing the Security Council.

  We had serious concerns about how our proposals would be received by the Security Council, and in particular by the United States. In advocating for a massive expansion of the humanitarian program, we were threatening America’s containment policy.

  The United States was not against the importation of more food per se. But Washington was reticent to allow for the rehabilitation of Iraq’s heavy industry, for it saw every nut and bolt as a potential component in the fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. Fertilizers for agriculture could be used to make explosives. Centrifuges for Iraq’s pharmaceutical plants could be used to produce deadly biological toxins, chlorine gas for water purification could also be (and had been) used to spray chemical weapons at Kurdish villages. A long list of products were thus branded as “dual-use items.” The dilemma, when it came to such products as chlorine gas, was that unsafe water had killed far more Iraqis since the Gulf War than Saddam Hussein’s proscribed chemical weapons. In the balancing act between containing Saddam and saving Iraq’s civilians, we, at the UN Secretariat, chose the civilians.

  As we toiled to find the right formula to persuade the UN Security Council to expand the Oil-for-Food program, the infighting grew. The canned cheese battle was merely the first of many. Everyone, it seemed, had their own ideas as to what the Iraqi people should eat, how much money should go into water purification, transportation, agriculture, and so on. UNICEF, the children’s health agency, sought funding for breastfeeding campaigns; FAO, the agricultural agency, was fighting for animal vaccinations (some strange malady called “foot-and-mouth disease” had spread through Iraq’s ruminant herds); and UNESCO, the cultural branch, was whipping up a storm about education (the children needed school desks, schoolbooks, etc.).

  An avalanche of projects landed on our desks. Our photocopier went on strike and our fax machine was making pleading noises. I arranged the projects into paper skyscrapers in the conference room and told Pasha it was time for him to assemble his crisis team, composed of Spooky; a guy whose nickname was Dracula (for reasons that shall become clear); a woman called Cindy (Pasha’s special assistant, who didn’t yet have a bizarre nickname); and me, The Kid.

  “So, what do we do with all this shit?” wondered Pasha, looking at all the unstable paper piles on the table.

  It was a good question. We couldn’t just dump $50 billion worth of projects on the Security Council’s doorstep and say, “Here, you deal with it.”

  “We’ll probably need to set priorities,” said Spooky.

  “Who are we to set priorities?” asked Dracula.

  “We can ask the field mission to do it—again,” said Spooky. We had asked Halliday to prioritize the projects to begin with, but he chose to drown us instead.

  “We’ll need to set a ceiling,” I said.

  “What ceiling?” said Pasha.

  “Well, if we want to prioritize projects, we need to know how much money Iraq can spend. Meaning how much oil they can pump.”

  “That’s no longer a bottom-up approach,” said Dracula.

  “Fuck the bottom-up approach!” said Pasha. “The Kid is right. If the Iraqis can only pump $5 billion, it’s no use coming up with projects for $10 billion!”

  Dracula had to agree.

  Pasha turned to his special assis
tant. “Bring in the oil overseers!” he said, and then headed back to his office. A few minutes later, in came the strange individuals known as “the oil overseers.” A tall, gawky Russian and a high-strung little Frenchman appeared at the door and were invited to sit on Pasha’s couch.

  “How much oil money can Iraq generate every six months?” asked Pasha.

  “Zat is impossible to predict,” said the Frenchman. “It depends on ze price of ze euil!”

  “I know that the price, it flucturates,” said Pasha, doing a wave with his hand.

  “Fluc-tu-ates,” the Frenchman corrected.

  “What?”

  “Ze price. . . . It fluc-tu-ates,” insisted the Frenchman.

  “You think I’m a facking idiot?” growled Pasha.

  “Euh . . . neuh, of curse nut.”

  “I’m getting fed up with you guys, OK? You sit there all day long facking picking your nose while we’re working our ass off here, so don’t get me started!”

  Pasha was right. The oil overseers, whom we took to calling the Double-O’s, in part because they were secretive as spies and in part because they had twice times nothing to do all day long, were tasked with a job that required about half a day of real work per month. But it was an important half-day, so important that the Security Council would fight for months on end each time a new overseer had to be appointed. Their job was to check that the price of Iraqi oil matched market prices, in order to prevent Saddam from receiving kickbacks from oil traders. In this task, the Double-O’s would ultimately fail by a margin of billions of dollars. But at this stage, we merely had to get a number out of them: how much money could Iraq generate from its oil sales? And just doing that wasn’t easy, because they would have to decide whether to include in their projection the oil Iraq was smuggling out of the country illegally—a political hot potato, which the oil overseers were not willing to touch. As all oil professionals understood from the very beginning of this operation, we were dealing with two sets of numbers when it came to oil transactions: official numbers and real numbers (most deals with oil-producing dictatorships leave room for bribes and kickbacks). Having quickly figured out that neither Pasha nor I was aware of this practice, they found it awkwardly hard to explain the challenge they faced in coming up with a projection of how much oil revenue Iraq might generate during any given six-month phase of the program.