Backstabbing for Beginners: Read online

  Ramadan, the man we were here to meet, had been in charge of suppressing the Shiites of southern Iraq during that time. He had without question been one of Saddam’s top honchos on a number of dirty jobs. He was openly referred to as one of Saddam’s “enforcers.” He was at Saddam’s side from the very beginning and was so zealously loyal to him that he had managed never to be purged. Of the original band of criminals who executed the 1968 coup that put the Baath Party in power, he was the only one to have survived at Saddam’s side.

  Born to a family of farmers in the region of Mosul in northeast Iraq, Ramadan began his career as a bank clerk after completing his secondary education. From 1968 onward, he remained on the Revolutionary Command Council, which ruled until 2003. Among his known exploits that earned him Saddam Hussein’s trust, he headed a kangaroo court in 1970 that sentenced forty-four officers to death for plotting to overthrow the regime. He also led the People’s Army, a large paramilitary force at the service of the regime. It was disbanded in 1991 when he became vice president. Ramadan was accused by Iraqi exiles of crimes against humanity for his role in crushing the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 (estimated to have caused anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 deaths) and for his involvement in the killing of thousands of Kurds in the north in 1988. Ramadan followed every one of Saddam’s orders to the letter and often went overboard just to please his boss. Once, after Saddam had jokingly criticized his ministers for putting on too much weight, the guy went on a diet and lost twenty-seven kilograms. That’s almost sixty pounds! Now that’s motivation. I suppose he didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the torture chambers he was overseeing.

  As I stepped out of the car, I noticed that our driver, an Iraqi intelligence officer, was sweating profusely. Just setting foot inside the palace grounds made him horribly nervous. We had another Iraqi government official with us from the protocol, whom we called by his first name, Adnan, because he had this apologetic way about him that made me think he was an easygoing man who had been born in the wrong country at the wrong time.

  Walking into the palace, seven UN officials led by Pasha and me passed a life-size picture of young Saddam Hussein in a Rambo-like pose, clutching a heavy-duty machine gun and smiling to the camera from atop a pickup truck. He looked really happy—like he had just been shooting at people. This was not a picture I had seen in the media before, and I would have loved to take a photo, but we were forbidden to carry anything other than pen and paper into the meeting. Vice President Ramadan had escaped two assassination attempts that year alone, so even though we were visiting UN officials, the security check was rigorous. After passing metal detectors and getting patted down, felt up, and forced to empty our pockets, we were led into a vast rectangular room furnished in gold, pink, and cream Louis XIV furniture and opulent crystal chandeliers. The Iraqi protocol officer accompanying us from the Foreign Ministry was pale with fear at the thought of being in the vice president’s presence, and the rest of us were on edge, too. We sat silently for several minutes. I spotted a large mirror stuck to the wall at one end of the room. Was the meeting being videotaped?

  Finally, the vice president walked in. His handshake was feeble and fleeing, which suited me just fine. I could rationalize that I was doing my job, but my intrinsic hatred for men of his kind made me wonder what we were doing here to begin with. Why was the UN engaged in talks with this government? Had it not violated every principle our organization stood for? And could we sit here and talk shop with Ramadan without even mentioning his regime’s crimes against humanity, against the UN Charter?

  The answer would have to be yes. Talking to criminals like Taha Yassin Ramadan was a necessary component of making the Oil-for-Food program work. The minister of foreign affairs did not have a tenth of Ramadan’s power. Saddam had trusted this former bank teller and torturer with running the humanitarian program for the Iraqi side. I suppose this should have tipped us off as to Saddam’s intentions.

  An expression of disdain was pasted onto Ramadan’s face. A gun holster hung from his hip. Inside was a silver .45 Magnum with an ivory handle. The gun’s barrel pointed forward (toward us) when he sat down, which was not exactly a comfortable feeling. He remained silent for a few moments, which Pasha interpreted as an invitation to speak.

  It was not. Pasha had hardly uttered a sentence when the vice president cut him off. The contempt on Ramadan’s face was unmistakable. He began to speak through an interpreter, blasting the United States, Britain, and the UN for what seemed an eternity, occasionally raising his voice in a threatening manner, causing his interpreter, a scrawny little mouse of a man, to try to do the same. Evidently, they were a practiced duo.

  The VP would occasionally pause and fiddle with his gun holster, making it abundantly clear that Pasha wasn’t invited to talk. In fact, the vice president barely looked at Pasha the whole meeting, and so Pasha had the opportunity to throw some glances around the room. At one point, he did something incredible. Looking at Adnan, the protocol officer and the only Iraqi official we had sort of befriended, Pasha did an imitation of the vice president fiddling with his gun holster. This almost caused us to explode in laughter. I was able to contain myself only by looking down at my notes, but when I glanced at the Iraqi protocol officer, I saw that his face was painfully contorted. His jaw was trembling. Poor Adnan had tears in his eyes. I figured his only possible escape route, if Ramadan suddenly looked at him, was to pretend to be crying.

  Ramadan’s soliloquy lasted about thirty minutes. During that time, he complained that the Oil-for-Food program had stripped Iraq of its sovereignty and that our very presence in Iraq was insulting. Having basically accused us of being a bunch of spies (Spooky was not alone now), the VP finally stopped talking. Pasha didn’t even try to give him the runaround. After all, the man had a gun, and there were pretty good chances it was loaded. So he said a few polite words about how we would do our best to help the people of Iraq. Pasha then tried to extend an invitation for the vice president to visit New York, but Ramadan replied that the last time he had set foot in UN headquarters, he had met only liars and traitors who were at the beck and call of manipulative Zionists. Nice try, Pasha. Now we had the vice president going off on a rant again, complaining about the imperialist/Zionist conspiracy to undermine Iraq’s sovereignty, which, he reminded us, was protected by international law.

  It’s an interesting thing about international law: even those who trample it most violently and most often can occasionally be caught touting its merits.

  Ramadan let a beat pass to let that last point sink in, then he ordered Pasha to finish his coffee. Pasha picked up his cup with a grateful nod and a side glance at me, urging me to imitate him.

  To sit there and be lectured about international law by this criminal, and to hear my boss address him as “Your Excellency,” was nauseating. I had to ask myself what we were doing there drinking coffee with him. What service were we rendering to the Iraqi people by treating this monster with the highest respect? Sure, we needed the Iraqi government’s cooperation to make the humanitarian program work. But why were we acting as if we had no bargaining power?

  I imagined what would happen if, in the middle of Ramadan’s delirious and hateful rant, Pasha had gotten up, said he’d had enough, that he had gotten the clear impression that the Iraqi government was not interested in extending sincere cooperation to the UN, and that he would go back to New York and report this to the UN Security Council. Then what?

  Ramadan would probably have taken it down a notch and started treating us with a minimum amount of respect. For his alternative would have been to go tell his boss—the man for whom he had recently lost sixty pounds over a passing remark—that he had just screwed up their biggest opportunity to make money since the end of the Gulf War.

  Of course, Pasha couldn’t do this. He had to think about the Iraqi people. Any interruption in our operation would hurt them before it hurt the Iraqi regime. And second, such behavior likely would have cost Pasha hi
s job. When Richard Butler, the chief UN weapons inspector, confronted the Iraqi regime too zealously in 1998, Russia and France demanded that he be fired (and fired he was). It would have been a different situation if the UN Security Council were united in confronting Saddam’s regime. Then UN diplomats would have been able to hold Iraqi leaders to their word and to judge their deeds exactly as the resolutions intended. But the world we had created for ourselves with this unusual program forced us to compromise at every turn. Did it mean we were on our way to compromising ourselves?

  Pasha put his cup down, and the vice president nodded to his interpreter, signaling the end of the meeting. From our point of view, the encounter had been useless. From theirs, it had probably meant to serve as an intimidation session. Our failure to stand up to this kind of bullying would eventually cause us, and the organization we worked for, great harm. But as we exited the vice president’s palace, we couldn’t quite envisage a world in which the man we had just met with would be sitting behind bars and put on trial by the people he had oppressed.

  We got to meet some of these people and witness their suffering firsthand. But this only played to the regime’s advantage, because the more suffering we witnessed the more we wanted to help, and the more we wanted to help the easier it would be for Saddam and his cronies to manipulate our humanitarian efforts for their personal gain.

  In the years to come, the Iraqi dictator would prove more successful than any world leader at playing the game of UN politics. Not only would he use our program to fill his own pockets with billions of dollars; he would also use it to buy support in the UN Security Council. In the end, this multiple violator of international law would succeed in turning the UN into a defensive shield against the world’s largest superpower. That one of the world’s most vicious human rights abusers finally succeeded in turning international law to his advantage remains an astounding achievement, in the grand scheme of history. Woodrow Wilson had led America into the very unpopular First World War and launched the League of Nations in order, he said, to make the world “safe for democracy.” What we were doing through this masquerade of a humanitarian mission was making the world safer for Saddam’s dictatorship. So safe, in fact, that America would once again perceive him (rightly or wrongly) as a threat, years later, when the onset of the “war on terror” reshaped the Bush administration’s strategic outlook. By that time, our mission had become tragically distorted, and our reputations—in some cases our lives—had been destroyed.

  But far from imagining what the future held in store for us, as we left Vice President Ramadan’s palace, our thoughts were with Adnan, who had almost lost his composure to a frightening fit of laughter.

  “Poor Adnan,” said Pasha, as we got back in the car.

  “I know! How did he keep it together?” I wondered. “I thought he was going to explode.”

  “If he had laughed . . .” Pasha started. Then, instead of finishing his sentence, he looked at me and sliced his own throat with his thumb.

  Adnan joined us in the car, riding shotgun. We stayed silent for a moment, each of us looking out of our respective windows. When our eyes connected again, Pasha blinked at me, then tapped on Adnan’s shoulder and repeated his move, imitating the vice president fidgeting with his gun. This time Adnan exploded in laughter. The chauffeur was observing us with suspicion. Only after we passed the first public poster of Saddam was Adnan able to regain control.

  The freedom to laugh, I realized, had never been mentioned in any text of human rights law. We hear about freedom of expression or of association. But at heart, can either of those freedoms truly exist if the people don’t have the right to laugh at their leaders?

  As I pondered the question, I wondered how much “freedom of expression” I might have within the UN itself. Was this an organization that could withstand ridicule? Or would all the compromises we made with tyrants, and hence with our own declared principles, restrict my ability to tell the truth as I saw it?

  CHAPTER 7

  The Great Misunderstanding

  “Let there be no misunderstanding: we have no quarrel with the people of Iraq.”

  PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH,

  in his prewar radio address to the Iraqi people,

  September 17, 1990

  She was a beautiful six-year-old girl with sparkling hazelnut eyes and flowing brown hair. When we entered her room, she looked up from her coloring book and gave us a radiant smile.

  Our tour of the Baghdad hospital had been gruesome. The facility lacked everything from painkillers to antiseptics. The contrast between the plush vice presidential palace and the smelly green halls of the hospital located in the Shiite slum of Baghdad was striking. The tour was a beaten path, offered to all visiting journalists and foreign dignitaries. Halliday had visited several times and was highlighting the facility’s worst deficiencies as we walked through. Some of the patients were in such pain that they were hardly able to acknowledge us when we entered their room. The doctor said they had no painkillers. There were patients waiting to be cut open with dirty scalpels in operating rooms that had no electric light. There were emaciated kids, too. But this little girl looked healthy. She was excited to see visitors. Her eyes were playful, vibrant, and alert. She was so full of life that we forgot, for a brief moment, why we were there.

  “She is going to die,” said the minister of health.

  It seemed absurd. But the bright-eyed little girl, we were told, had a form of leukemia that was treatable in prewar Iraq but too expensive to cure in a country under economic sanctions. Before the Gulf War, and the ensuing sanctions, Iraq was known to have one of the best-performing health-care systems in the Middle East. Clearly, the Sunnis received better treatment than the Shiites or the Kurds, and many government statistics from the time were unreliable and somewhat pumped up to reflect the glories of the totalitarian state. But when asked to compare the current conditions with their former work environment, the doctors had merely to grimace to make the tragic gap evident. And the girl before us was a clear victim of this decadence.

  The girl’s mother sat silently at her side. She showed no surprise at our presence. Surely we were not the first international visitors to be paraded through her daughter’s room. She avoided eye contact with us, trying as best she could to maintain some dignity, even as her government put her private pain on public display.

  The little girl had made a drawing, and she held it up proudly for all to see. That’s when Pasha broke down in tears. The under secretary general cried uncontrollably, in plain sight of the child and her mother. The tensions of the day had been extreme, and to see such a beautiful child condemned to death was just unbearable. The emaciated kids we could deal with, for some reason. But not her.

  Seeing his guest cry, the minister of health began to cry as well, followed by his deputy and the Iraqi protocol officer who acted as our minder. All the crying made the mother start weeping too. Soon the whole room was crying, except for the little girl, who was unaware of her fate, and me, who couldn’t accept it.

  I walked over and sat on her bed, in an attempt to shield her from the spectacle. Her smile had disappeared, leaving only an innocent question mark on her face. Pasha was wailing—unstoppable—and the Iraqi health minister was struggling to keep up with him. About a year later, Spooky told me Saddam had thrown his health minister in jail. Perhaps he had failed to cut Saddam in on his business, which consisted in reselling medicine purchased through the UN to pharmacies in Jordan. Media reports eventually surfaced, starting in 1998, citing anecdotes of customers walking into pharmacies in Jordan and being asked if they wanted to purchase legitimate painkillers or secondhand “Oil-for-Food pills.” To us it was just a rumor that never got checked out by our own UN observers. As similar rumors grew in the years that followed, nobody inside the UN moved a finger to confirm them or report them to the UN Security Council in New York. We would learn to live with them for reasons, and with justifications, that can only be comprehended by peopl
e who were more familiar with the UN’s culture of incompetence than I was at the time.

  At this early stage the questions in my mind were simply accumulating, taking an increasing toll on my mental faculties. It would take me years to see clearly, to relearn a skill I had mastered perfectly well by age four—namely, that of simply describing the obvious. The diversion of goods within Iraq was systematic in most ministries and would grow with time, as our observers failed to catch on to the scheme or neglected to mention it in their reports. In total, the diversion would be valued at $1.9 billion. Enough to cure lots of little girls from lots of diseases.

  Here’s what we didn’t know, as we stood there weeping (or, in my case, holding back tears for fear of frightening the little girl): Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Defense, his Ministry of Military Industrialization, and his General Security Directorate, all of which were obviously not allowed to sign contracts under the UN’s humanitarian program, simply ordered other ministries like Health or Agriculture to sign contracts for them. Or, for efficiency’s sake, they just borrowed another ministry’s letterhead and wrote up the contracts themselves. Evidence later emerged showing that a great number of trucks (in particular, models that could be used to pull artillery) had been ordered, along with tires, batteries, forklifts, and even date palm excavators, which were used to uproot palm trees and transport them to presidential palaces. We thought all of this was being used to transport food and medicine, and we couldn’t understand why the humanitarian situation failed to improve at a more rapid pace. Records eventually showed that Taha Yassin Ramadan, who had just been lecturing us on international law, illegally contracted for $29 million worth of equipment to refurbish his palatial offices. But such records were not available to us then. All we had to judge the situation by was what we saw and what the Iraqi ministers were telling us. Here was a little girl who was going to die because of UN sanctions.