Backstabbing for Beginners: Page 9

  The girl dropped her drawing on the floor, which was not surprising, given the terrible impact it seemed to have on her visitors. I picked it up and made a face like I was very impressed. I pinched her cheek and smiled at her to get her attention away from all the drama. She looked a bit like one of my nieces, so I just behaved as I would with her. I didn’t speak Arabic, so I spoke to her in English, using sign language as best I could to clown around with her, in the hope that the weeping delegation would soon leave the room.

  But the girl was obsessed with all the crying men behind me. She asked her mother a question, which I assumed was “Why is everybody crying?” But she got no answer. She looked at the table next to her and picked up a doll, and made a movement to suggest she wanted someone to take it. Maybe if she gave them her doll, all the big men would stop crying?

  The minister of health was just about done pretending to cry. His performance would not have gotten him into the Actors Studio, but he had managed to produce real tears, which, given his lack of formal training, was pretty impressive. Acting was not so much a starving artist’s occupation in Iraq as a survival skill for most public office holders. Anybody who joined the Baath Party had to develop some skills on the acting front, if only to look convincing while lying to foreigners like us. When he finished he peeked at his gold watch and invited us over to his office.

  Before exiting, Halliday gave the girl’s mother some money. In the following months, he did his best to raise funds to buy the chemotherapy drugs for her treatment. Halliday was someone with whom I would have intense political disagreements about how to deal with the regime of Saddam Hussein, but he was a true humanitarian—one who actually dipped into his own pockets to help these and other destitute people. Unfortunately, it did not always make a difference. On Christmas Day, I was in my office at UN headquarters in New York when I received an e-mail from Denis. The little angel had passed away, he said, and he hoped that her tragic fate would persuade me to support lifting the UN sanctions.

  The tears I had held back for months welled up. She wasn’t the first or the last Iraqi child to die from a curable disease during the sanctions. Contaminated water alone had claimed thousands of young lives since 1991—about a quarter of a million, according to the most conservative estimates available. But statistics were statistics. This was a little girl I had met.

  Her memory stayed with me during countless hours spent in the UN Security Council in New York, listening to ambassadors jousting for the moral high ground, even as they maneuvered to squeeze the most out of Iraq’s resources. My memory of her always came accompanied by the question her mother had asked as we exited the room, and which we would hear again and again from the Iraqi civilians we met: “Why are you doing this to us?”

  It was all they could ask. They weren’t allowed to have a real discussion with us, because we were accompanied by minders from the Iraqi government who were immediately recognized as Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police. They couldn’t ask us why we left Saddam in power after destroying their entire infrastructure in 1991, effectively condemning them to a future of despair. They could only ask why we were doing “this” to them. Be it in a hospital, or a dilapidated water station, or a slum overrun by sewage from a bombed-out water pipe, there were no lack of visuals to illustrate what they meant by “this.” In the words of the first international envoy to visit Iraq after the Gulf War, Iraq had been bombed back “to the pre-industrial age.”

  This statement, by the former president of Finland, was not an exaggeration. The problem was not with the precision of the so-called smart bombs. They flew in and out of windows and chimneys all right. The problem was with the actual targets selected by the Pentagon. Unlike the planners of the 2003 Iraq War, who focused their fire primarily on government facilities and military installations, the planners of the 1991 campaign actually targeted the entire civilian infrastructure of Iraq for destruction. Secretary of State James Baker had sent a letter to Saddam explicitly promising that Iraq would have no economy to speak of after the war. That was a promise America kept by systematically bombing every bridge, every water station, and anything that looked remotely like a factory. It was part and parcel of the strategy to deprive Saddam of a functional society, rather than to deprive that society from a dysfunctional Saddam.

  After a month of bombing and a hundred-hour ground campaign, the United States signed a cease-fire agreement with the man George H.W. Bush had previously compared to Adolf Hitler.

  “Let there be no misunderstanding,” Bush had said in his radio address to the Iraqi people before Desert Storm. “We have no quarrel with the people of Iraq.”

  And yet it was Iraq’s people, not Saddam and his henchmen, who suffered the most from the war and the policy of sanctions that followed. Pentagon planners had detailed projections showing that the bombing of Iraq’s water and sanitation network would cause outbreaks of waterborne diseases. They knew that the obliteration of the country’s electrical grid would incapacitate hospitals, prevent cold storage of medicine, black out operating rooms, and cause most economic activity to cease. What they hadn’t planned for was how the Iraqi population was supposed to cope with this damage in the aftermath of the war, especially with sanctions still in place.

  If we didn’t have a quarrel with the people of Iraq, why were they the primary victims of our policies?

  Surely there had been some kind of misunderstanding. Or had we simply lied to them?

  On May 7, 1991, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates (the current defense secretary) helped clear the misunderstanding when he declared, “Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore, Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power.”2

  Iraqis would pay the price. It was a far cry from the promise of international justice announced in Bush’s “New World Order” speech. But it may survive in the history books as the only honest statement the international community ever made to the Iraqi people during the entire span of the conflict.

  Carl von Clausewitz, the architect of modern warfare doctrine, once described war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” By maintaining Iraq in a state of limbo after the war, we had turned Clausewitz’s mantra on its head. Our policy toward Iraq was a continuation of war through other means. But the primary victims of our policy were not our declared targets. Until we met the victims of this silent war face to face, I believe we thought of them as “collateral damage.” Only that label didn’t fit. We were hardly causing enough harm to Saddam Hussein and his clique to call the rest of the damage we inflicted on Iraq’s civilians “collateral.”

  Sure enough, we were there to help minimize this damage now. But one thing was becoming clear. Then and in the future, we would be working with a population that had every reason to mistrust our declared best intentions.

  CHAPTER 8

  From Russia With Love

  RUSSIAN EMBASSY BAGHDAD, NOVEMBER 1997

  A claustrophobic panic room with beige, soundproof padded walls. Saddam’s ears could not reach us here. The Russians had made sure of that. Their Soviet-era embassy was built to sustain a siege. Merely penetrating into this room had involved passing through a series of thick doors with key codes and strange beeping locks.

  The Russian envoy was tall, fit, and surprisingly young, with a crew cut of white hair and a wide wolflike grin on his face. He didn’t look like an ambassador at all. He looked like a karate instructor. And his assistant looked like he could bend metal bars over his knee. I decided these guys were from the KGB school of international diplomacy.

  The ambassador offered us some tea and encouraged us to grab a cookie. The man had initially offered us vodka, but much to my regret, Pasha had declined.

  I took out my notepad, and the ambassador’s eyes zoomed in on it. His smile dropped. Pasha saw that, and he told me that it was all right, I didn’t need to take notes.

  “This is informal,” said Pasha, a
nd the Russians nodded enthusiastically. The ambassador was smiling again. He leaned forward on his seat and said, “So!”

  And that was it. He didn’t add anything. He just nodded, wringing his hands together, tapping his foot, and waiting for Pasha to speak. So Pasha eventually spoke, outlining various aspects of the program as he munched on his cookie, which didn’t make him too easy to understand. Eventually the Russian seized on a key word. Pasha had mentioned that there was a chance the Oil-for-Food program might be expanded.

  “Expanded!” the ambassador repeated, leaning even further toward us, all ears, and still doing that nod of his to urge Pasha to elaborate.

  “Well, obviously the Security Council has to approve it, but we’re going to do a review of the situation . . . with recommendations, you know, from the secretary general.”

  “When will you submit this report?” asked the ambassador.

  Pasha looked at me. We hadn’t thought that far ahead. But Pasha ventured that it might be ready in three to four months. The ambassador’s eyes went into REM mode for a few seconds, as he calculated his way to the date when an eventual expansion would come into force, then they settled, like dollar signs on a slot machine.

  “So perhaps in the spring!” said the ambassador avidly, scanning Pasha for a reaction.

  “Maybe,” said Pasha. “Inshallah! ”

  “Yes, inshallah, yes!” said the ambassador, with a nod to his deputy, who instead of saying “inshallah,” like the others, just blinked. An awkward silence ensued, during which Pasha opted to seize another cookie.

  “The humanitarian situation here is very bad,” said the Russian, trying not to smile for just one second. It seemed hard for him. I think he was genuinely excited. His smile was not that of a selfless humanitarian, relieved at the prospect that a child might get more to eat. His smile was that of a guy who was about to eat a big fat juicy steak all by himself.

  “What do you think of the security situation?” asked Pasha. He had just given the Russian some high-value information to report to his superiors in Moscow. So the least the Russian could do was throw us a bone. Since our meeting with Foreign Minister Sahaf we assumed the U.S. bombing campaign was off, for now. But with nothing other than news reports to work with, we had no idea what the future held in store.

  The Russian told us with some assurance that the crisis would probably not reignite before a year’s time. His confidence surprised me. I had never thought of international crises as moments scheduled well in advance. I wondered how a Russian diplomat would know anything about future U.S. plans to strike Iraq. But in retrospect, it is not difficult to figure out how the ambassador arrived at this conclusion. He didn’t necessarily know about U.S. plans per se. But he knew what America’s policy was. It had been stated again and again on the Sunday morning talk shows. If Saddam blocked the work of the UN weapons inspectors, the United States would act militarily. The policy was clear, but it carried the disadvantage of giving Saddam the initiative in deciding when to produce a crisis. The challenge, from Saddam’s point of view, was to gauge correctly what types of actions would tip the scales, causing the United States to cease playing the diplomatic game and go into countdown mode for military action.

  Saddam had a range of options at his disposal for sabotaging the work of the UN inspectors, and he was always testing how much he could get away with. From blocking UN convoys with sheep herds to actually expelling inspectors from the country, Saddam could pick and choose and then watch the reaction of the international community on CNN. While ambassadors would call for concerted action in New York, Saddam had various ways of wrecking the harmony in the UN Security Council. His latest test had involved singling out U.S. members of the inspection team for expulsion, while maintaining Russian, French, and Chinese inspectors in Iraq. The result was that all UN inspectors had withdrawn right before we had flown in. They would be allowed back in February 1998 under a deal brokered by Kofi Annan, then expelled again in August of that same year, sparking Operation Desert Fox some four months later. The whole process would indeed take a year, just as the Russian Ambassador had predicted.

  Ultimately, all sides understood that a clash was inevitable, because Saddam’s bottom line and Washington’s bottom line were not compatible. Saddam wanted the inspectors out of Iraq; Washington wanted them inside his palaces. The only question was when the next showdown would take place.

  With the prospect of a massive expansion of the Oil-for-Food program, Saddam decided to wait about a year before halting cooperation with the inspectors completely.

  Once UNSCOM was definitely out of the country (December 1998), the Russian Federation moved to secure this gain by making sure the inspection team wouldn’t return to Iraq anytime soon. Citing evidence that the United States had used UNSCOM to spy on Saddam (wasn’t that the whole point?), Russia moved to have Richard Butler, the chief UN inspector, removed from his position. UNSCOM was temporarily dismantled, only to be renamed UNMOVIC, a more Slavic-sounding name for a tamer organization that would remain barred from entering Iraq until right before the war, when Washington suddenly adopted a more aggressive stance toward Iraq, citing the four-year interruption in UN inspections as proof that Saddam had something to hide. Throughout what we might call a five-year “perma-crisis,” Moscow and Baghdad acted in collusion to prevent UN inspectors from resuming their work. As the years of sanctions wore on and the Oil-for-Food program expanded, what motivated Moscow to offer such dedicated support to Saddam’s policies?

  Let’s follow the money. In total, Iraq would sell $19.1 billion worth of oil to Russian companies. Why is this significant? After all, oil is traded on the international market, and Russia could well have bought it from Venezuela. Only here’s what we didn’t know as we sat there chatting with Russia’s ambassador in Baghdad: Iraq was planning to sell its oil at below-market prices. And Saddam Hussein explicitly allocated a third of Iraq’s underpriced oil to Russia’s political leaders, meaning only they, or a company they approved of, had a right to purchase the below-market oil and resell it to an actual oil company at a profit. This would later become known as the “oil-voucher” system.

  Saddam understood a thing or two about bribing people. In the case of Russia, he went right to the top. President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, was allocated millions of barrels of oil throughout the life of the program to do with as he pleased. According to the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the oil allocations to Putin’s chief of staff amounted to a total value of $2,982,984.28, which was paid directly to the benefit of the Russian Presidential Council, headed by Alexander Voloshin. Everybody won, except of course the Iraqi people.

  As we would observe in coming years, one way Vladimir Putin consolidated absolute power in his own hands was by buying off other parties in the Russian Duma. Here, too, Saddam and our Oil-for-Food program would come in handy.

  In addition to the bribes offered to the Kremlin, the Iraqis allocated oil to various Russian political parties, including seventy-three million barrels to the fascist (and misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party, headed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and 121.1 million barrels to the Communist Party, in the name of its leader, Gennady Zyuganov (who came in second during the Russian presidential elections of 1996 and 2000). Both men would often travel to Iraq and swear their allegiance to Saddam Hussein. In February 2003, Zyuganov met with Saddam, and when he returned to Moscow, he called on Russia to use its veto in the UN Security Council in order to avoid a war.

  Not that the government of Vladimir Putin needed any encouragement from Zyuganov to protect the regime of Saddam Hussein. Iraq had done much better than distribute underpriced oil allocations to various political parties in Russia. It had handed over responsibility to the Russian government itself to choose which Russian private companies would be given allocations. This meant that Victor Kalyuzhky, the minister of fuel and energy, was enlisted to hand out Saddam’s bribes in Russia for him.

  Here’
s how this worked. Kalyuzhky would draw up a list, copies of which were subsequently found in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. This list would name the companies the Russian government felt should receive allocations of oil from Iraq. The Iraqis then sold the underpriced oil to these companies (which included Lukoil, Yukos, Sibneft—basically, all the companies owned by Russia’s Putin-friendly oligarchs).

  For the price of $19.1 billion, Saddam Hussein had, essentially, bought himself Russia’s seat on the UN Security Council. It guaranteed that the United States would never again be able to attack Iraq with the approval of the UN.

  Putin was allowed to use Saddam’s underpriced oil to dole out cash favors to Russia’s oligarchs and political parties, and Saddam was allowed to buy (mostly) Russian- or Chinese-made weapons on the black market.

  In addition to benefiting illicitly from oil sales, Iraq’s trading partners also poured cash into Saddam’s pockets through the sale of humanitarian goods. Here’s how that worked. Companies that sold products to Iraq through the Oil-for-Food program would send a 10 percent kickback to Saddam. (On some occasions, it went as high as 30 percent, but on average 10 percent was the rule.) In the case of Russian companies, they would literally send the money in cash. An employee would head over to the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow with a sports bag (or several) filled with money—mostly dollars, though toward the end of his reign Saddam seemed to prefer euros. Three Iraqi Embassy employees were in charge of taking receipt of the cash. Because Saddam liked to have his own people keep an eye on one another, these three employees included the embassy’s commercial counselor, its accountant, and a third staffer who would change every couple of months, to make sure the other two didn’t get any funny ideas.