A debate related to this article, between Phillip Bobbitt and David Hannay on the wisdom of supplanting the UN with a "League of Democracies," can beread here.
I woke up in a cold sweat. I used to think that Hollywood exaggerated such post-nightmare scenes. That was before I started working for the largest, most incoherent and, ultimately, most corrupt humanitarian operation in UN history. Sitting bolt upright in bed, I patted around in the darkness to figure out where I was. My pillow was moist. My clock marked five-something am. It was 28th April 2004.
In my nightmare, I had been walking up to a podium in a large, wood-panelled room filled with grey-haired men wearing grey suits, sitting in a semicircle like a court of elders. The walk took forever. As I scavenged my pockets to locate my speech and my glasses, these wise-looking men gave me sceptical looks. So far, the dream was not entirely absurd. In real life, I was scheduled to testify before the US Congress international relations committee that morning. I was to speak about the UN "oil-for-food" scandal.
What made this dream a nightmare was not the prospect of addressing an audience of scandalised lawmakers. I was not being hauled before them to be judged; I was invited because I had blown the whistle on certain aspects of the fraud. I was also sweating about having to say something useful about a subject that has confounded generations of diplomats and academics since the UN's creation in 1945. In the dream, when I reached the podium and unfolded my speech, I discovered that it had only one bullet point: "UN reform." I knew from experience that these words provoked uncontrolled yawns from most listeners. I looked up and began—yet no sound came out when I spoke. I was checking the microphone when a woman in the audience stood up and yelled: "It's not the microphone! It's him!" I thought I was making an eloquent case for UN reform, but all that was coming out was a big nothing.
That's when I woke up.
***
We weren't even sure how much money had gone missing—estimates range from $1.3bn to $20bn. Overall, about 2,300 international companies had participated in the fraud, and hundreds of high-level politicians, diplomats and business tycoons from Australia to Moscow had profited from the scam. The Iraqi people had been cheated out of a large chunk of the money we had guaranteed would go towards their welfare.
"Oops" was the operative word.
***
At least I didn't oversleep that day. And the dream was important: wasn't the whole point of my blowing the whistle to push for more transparency and accountability in the UN system? In short, wasn't UN reform my goal?
That was what I had been telling myself. Only as I prepared to testify, and researched the history of UN attempts at reform, did I have a disturbing epiphany: the UN was never designed to be accountable in the first place. By definition, the security council, the body that is in effect the UN's own executive branch of government, is a self-nominated group of states that determines what the organisation does through its many agencies and programmes. If the UN violates its own rules (as had been the case with oil-for-food), the only punishment its members are liable to receive is from their collective selves. None of the fraud and theft that marked our seven years of operation could have occurred without the complicity, and in many cases, active participation of member states sitting on the security council.
The oil-for-food scandal only came to light when an Iraqi newspaper called Al Mada ("The Dawn") scooped the world on 25th January 2004 by publishing the secret list Saddam Hussein used to keep track of his bribe-takers. This document was one of many that were found after the 2003 US-led invasion. Within the UN, we knew about this fraud through persistent rumours that were often confirmed by our own paperwork. For example, some contractors would be so bold as to include a "10 per cent surcharge" in their application for the export of goods to Iraq. Others, like the Swedish truckmaker Scania, confused by the Iraqis' explicit demand for kickbacks, would call the UN to check on its legality. Of course it was illegal, but it was so pervasive that few bureaucrats dared to do anything—especially when the UN's top echelons were turning a blind eye. Somewhere along the road, our "oversight" mission turned into "overlook."
***
When I first joined the UN, aged 24, I knew the institution was flawed. I had studied the failures in Srebrenica in 1995 (when UN peacekeepers toasted vodka-shots with Ratko Mladic shortly before 8,000 men and boys were mowed down by machine-gun fire in a field nearby), and Rwanda in1994 (where the UN ordered its peacekeepers out, even though the UN force commander had called for reinforcements and had warned of an impending genocide), and most recently, in Darfur (where it took the UN over seven months to pull the alarm bell on the massacre, and then refused to call it a genocide). I had gathered interviews from generals and civilians involved in these debacles as part of my thesis research at university. But I also believed it could be reformed, if only people were willing to change and, above all, to take responsibility for their actions.
But on the morning of my testimony my nightmare forced me to acknowledge a nagging question. Was? the UN as an institution capable of reform? In the past, repeated efforts have stalled. Watered down in committees ruled by unaccountable states, most past initiatives have mirrored the definition of insane behaviour—doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
And on the occasions when the UN fails those who need its help the most, the reasons often have less to do with? reformable inefficiencies in the system than with a lack of political will, both from the five permanent members of the security council, and from the UN's top bureaucrats. The latter consider it a top mission priority to avoid causing any offence to these states. Nobody wants to say "we don't care" when civilians are being butchered or cheated out of critical humanitarian aid. But it is the yawning gap between words and deeds that lies at the core of the UN's greatest failures.
The scandal that had lawmakers calling for "heads to roll" at the UN had less to do with the fact that corruption had occurred than with the international community's unwillingness to admit that it had. And this reluctance was born of the realisation that no one had cared enough about the welfare of Iraq's civilians to confront spiralling corruption. It was a crime in which everyone had participated. While Russian companies and politicians topped the list of bribe takers and kickback providers, even companies like Halliburton and Chevron, which used to employ two of President Bush's closest advisers (Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, respectively) were doing questionable trades with Saddam Hussein's Iraq under the now infamous UN operation.
***
As Hunter S Thompson once put it, "in a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught." And, after one of its officials told the New York Times that it had no idea the fraud was taking place until the Al Mada list came out in 2003, the UN had indeed been caught in a lie. Plainly, this wasn't the case.
On Saddam's list of oil-voucher recipients was the former boss of my boss, Benon Sevan, the UN under secretary-general in charge of the whole oil-for-food operation and a Cypriot of Armenian descent. We used to call Sevan "Pasha," in part because of his Byzantine management style, and also in retribution for his own habit of assigning nicknames to all his staff. Mine was "The Kid," a rather affectionate one I had acquired when Pasha decided to take me under his wing back in 1997, choosing me to accompany him on his first visit to Iraq. I had dedicated my best years to helping Pasha make the oil-for-food operation work. And here I was, seven years later, about to testify in Congress, in an act that would inevitably be construed by Pasha as a stab in the back.
I didn't yet know if Pasha was guilty of accepting bribes, so I still felt the urge to protect him. I didn't mention to Congress an incident back in 1998 at the Baghdad Hunting Club, when Pasha and I were having lunch with Iraq's minister of oil. In the middle of lunch, Pasha had mentioned that he had a friend who was interested in purchasing Iraqi oil. Now, Pasha stood accused of receiving kickbacks from that friend after he was awarded contracts for under-priced Iraqi oil.
Pasha said he was made into a scapegoat. And in a sense, he did take the sins of many other diplomats with him when he was forced into resignation and exile in Northern Cyprus, where he remains.
He had worked for the UN since before I was born and knew its limitations only too well. Once, during a meeting, he compared the UN to a donkey—which provoked laughter because it hinted at some truths. A slow, recalcitrant, passive-aggressive, frustrating yet occasionally convenient animal, the UN donkey gets little credit in the instances when it helps civilians (its interventions in Liberia in 2003 and East Timor in 1999 can be described at least as partial successes), yet it never fails to get a beating—especially from the US Congress—when it fails to live up to often unrealistic expectations.
Pasha's conception of the UN-as-donkey may have contributed to his alleged decision to profit at the expense of Iraq's civilians, as did so many other members of the international elite. Having been invited by the international community to run what was effectively a giant racket, he may have decided to profit from it. If he were to be found guilty, I would need to answer this question, if only for myself: was it Pasha who had corrupted the UN, or the UN that had corrupted Pasha? ?
***
Pasha was a man I had trusted; someone who (it seemed to me) cared about our mission. The mission itself, however, was incoherent. The UN was expected to save the Iraqi people from the UN's own sanctions. In Brooklyn, that is called a protection racket. In return for "saving" Iraq's civilians, the UN charged about $1bn in fees from Iraq's oil exports. From these, US-friendly companies based in Kuwait before Saddam's invasion in August 1990 were paid reparations, amounting to one third of the value of all Iraqi oil exports under the UN humanitarian operation. In return for agreeing to this, countries like Russia and France and some of Iraq's neighbours were granted the majority of Saddam's business (and the opportunity to yield illicit profits by agreeing to provide kickbacks to the Iraqi dictator).
It was a perfect scam if one assumed that the Iraqi people would never have a voice in the matter. Most journalists covering Iraq before the war knew about the rampant corruption that plagued the oil-for-food operation. But it took a free Iraqi newspaper to deem this story worthy of front-page billing. The embarrassment Al Mada caused haunts some of the world's largest corporations to this day.
Not all the names on Saddam's list would be found guilty in a court of law. Russian and middle eastern leaders were never prosecuted in their own countries. But most western-based individuals or organisations from democracies with independent judicial systems, faced prosecution from domestic courts.
By contrast, the UN's initial public reaction to Al Mada's scoop offers future students of public relations a case study in incompetence. For nine months, the spokesman's office issued a series of denials, followed by retractions, as more and more embarrassing information came to light. Finally, Kofi Annan was forced to hire a real public relations professional (Mark Malloch Brown) to help with message management. Annan subsequently admitted that "it is highly possible that there has been quite a lot of wrongdoing."
An independent inquiry was set up in April 2004, headed by Paul Volcker, a former Fed chairman and director of the United Nations Association of the US. The inquiry found that Pasha had requested and received allocations of 7.3m barrels of oil on behalf of a Panama-registered trading company called African Middle East Petroleum Co. It also found that UN officials ignored early signs that humanitarian goods shipped to Iraq before 2003 were given brief (if any) inspection.
But this was too little too late. As revelations kept trickling out from the two-year investigation, even the staunchest UN supporters felt overwhelmed and disoriented by the sheer scale of the scandal. Nobody could deny that we had ripped off Iraq's civilians at a time when they were at their weakest. Worse yet, we did so under the aegis of the very institution that was supposed to embody the "highest aspirations of mankind."
After all of this, it came as no surprise to me when the reform proposals offered by Paul Volcker and his investigators were subsequently defeated in the UN's own budget committee. I wondered: was the challenge really to reform the UN? Or might it be more productive to reform our expectations of it?
***
Franklin Roosevelt first coined the term "United Nations" in 1942, and after the second world war, the US sought to give new life to the idea of a world organisation dedicated to the preservation of peace. The wartime alliance was thus transformed into a permanent institution—but expanded to include all independent states. Its ambition was to be more effective than the League of Nations, which had faded into irrelevance in the face of fascist aggression in the 1930s, or indeed the Concert of Europe, which followed the devastating Napoleonic wars.
The Concert, the League and the UN all were intellectually rooted in the vision of Immanuel Kant, expressed in his 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace." (The title, inspired by the sign over the door of a Dutch inn where Kant once stopped for a drink, pessimistically implied that the only peace on earth was to be found in the grave.) Kant's vision was of an international system where independent, democratic, accountable states banded together and adhered to rules for the peaceful resolution of their conflicts. This came to life in the US after the civil war ended in 1865, when all the states in the union were finally forced to extend constitutional rights to all their citizens. After the second world war, Kant's vision guided the formation of the EU. In both cases, peace has been successfully perpetuated between the democratic member states involved.
But in their attempts to replicate Kant's vision on a global scale, the crafters of the League and the UN departed from his original blueprint in one crucial respect: high standards for membership. In Kant's model, only democratic republics could apply. Instead, the UN's architects, in their desire wanted to make their project truly "universal," decided that any independent nation state should be admitted, whatever its style of government.
This decision is understandable given the historical context. The UN founders looked back on a world in which big powers—whether they were the Nazis or the European colonial powers—dominated and sometimes tyrannised the small or less developed. Indeed, decolonisation gave the the UN its first and most successful mission. But this open admission policy explains a great deal about why the UN now so often fails to live up to its own high ideals.
Not even a bridge club can function coherently if the players are not obliged to play by the rules. The UN fails to enforce accountability on its members primarily because so many of them aren't accountable to their own people. When was the last time Kim Jong Il lost a vote in the North Korean parliament? The result of not discriminating is the bizarre spectacle of genocidal regimes being given a chair at the Human Rights Commission. This approach has more in common with Kafka than Kant.
Sometimes, despite this, the efforts of hopeful idealists do make a difference. The UN's humanitarian agencies, like Unicef or the World Food Program save lives every day. But this gap between the UN's core theoretical mission, and its ability to deliver on it, is problematic.
***
That's what I decided to tell Congress that morning. And in doing so I made something of a fool of myself. The hearings were, after all, a confrontation between UN-bashers and UN-apologists. Conservatives were trying to drown out the outrage that no significant weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq by touting this UN fiasco as "the worst scandal in history." Liberals sought to pin the blame for the Iraq quagmire on the Bush administration's rejection of multilateralism and UN rules.
I ended my testimony by saying: "At the end of the period that took a severe toll on the UN, there is a historical opportunity to take stock of the UN's shortcomings and initiate a real debate about the organisation's future role and the principles that should guide its actions."
A strange silence followed. After several Congressmen whispered to each other, a recess was called. When we met again, an hour later, the partisan brawl resumed between pro-UN and anti-UN lawmakers. None of their questions were directed to me. Clearly, I hadn't understood the whole point of the meeting.
Perhaps Pasha had chosen my nickname well. Only a kid could fail to see the point in attacking or defending the UN if its flaws could be traced back to its very design: one that sacrificed effectiveness in the name of universality. While the world may one day be ready for the global application of Kant's vision, we have no excuse today to pretend, or expect, that his vision of a democratic peace can be successfully applied globally. To borrow Pasha's image, we stand no better chance of reforming the UN into a truly accountable institution than we might stand at changing a donkey into a racehorse.
But this does not absolve the world's democracies from the responsibility to get their collective act together in the meantime. John McCain's proposal to form a "League of Democracies," and Barack Obama's Berlin speech exhorting the need to strengthen the democratic alliance, are both consistent with Kant's original vision. The choice is between trying to fix an ossified, outdated and impossibly ambitious institution, or beginning work on a new one.
