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THE SECURITY COUNCIL'S ROLE<br>
Off Target<br>
by James Traub<br><br>
The New Republic<br>
Post date: 02.10.05<br>
Issue date: 02.21.05<br><br>
In early 1995, American and British diplomats began to worry that the
crippling sanctions the United Nations had imposed on Iraq five years
earlier were becoming too unpopular to sustain. The sanctions were
essential to keeping weapons inspectors in the country and preventing
Saddam Hussein from importing war matériel; but they had also crippled
the Iraqi economy, with GDP per capita dropping from $2,304 to $495 over
the previous six years. Saddam had adroitly manipulated his people's
suffering to undermine worldwide support for the sanctions regime.
"There was a discussion about whether we could hold the sanctions in
place," says a former official on President Clinton's National
Security Council staff. "There was erosion for humanitarian reasons,
and we were worried that Rolf Ekeus"--the head of unscom, the U.N.
body searching Iraq for chemical and biological weapons--"would say
he had accounted for everything. The French and the Russians wanted to
find the quickest way out of sanctions so they could start selling to the
Iraqis." Thus was born the Oil-for-Food Programme, under which
Saddam was allowed to sell oil to buy food and medical supplies, and
which, over the last few months, has become a ten-ton millstone around
the U.N.'s neck. <br><br>
Several central truths have been lost in the ruckus over Oil-for-Food.
One is that the program was devised by the administrations of Bill
Clinton and John Major, not by the United Nations--not, that is, by
international civil servants. Another is that the compromises that
allowed Saddam to exploit the program were baked in from the start. In
1991, the U.N. Security Council had passed a resolution permitting Iraq
to sell limited amounts of oil in exchange for food and medicine. But
Saddam had balked; the system was to be controlled by the United Nations,
and he would not accept a program he could not manipulate. Four years
later, with the humanitarian crisis deepening and the sanctions
themselves threatened, American and British negotiators agreed to let
Saddam control the distribution of goods within the country and choose
who would buy Iraqi oil. It was plain that the dictator would use the
deal to line his own pockets and to try to evade the sanctions. According
to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, then an official in the British Foreign Office
and later his country's ambassador to the United Nations, "It was
realized that a certain amount of misbehavior was going to happen on the
Iraqi side if they were going to accept this. But the Iraqi government
had to agree, or it wouldn't work." <br><br>
In other words, Oil-for-Food was a conscious act of diplomacy. And it
was, on balance, a successful one: The program saved the sanctions, and
the sanctions made possible the disarmament of Iraq. But it was also,
inevitably, a mess; and the U.N.'s critics have seized upon the program
as a mighty bludgeon with which to beat the institution silly. New York
Times columnist William Safire melodramatically dubbed Oil-for-Food
"the largest financial rip-off in history." Federal and state
prosecutors, and House and Senate panels, are scrutinizing the program.
And, last week, an investigative body appointed by U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan and headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal
Reserve, issued an interim report on the program. Volcker concluded that
Benon Sevan, the U.N. official who managed Oil-for-Food, abused his
position to benefit an oil trader and quite possibly himself. Volcker has
not yet finished investigating many other aspects of the program,
including the alleged involvement of Annan's son, Kojo. Volcker's
219-page report, however, contains no evidence of systemic fraud or
corruption; even Sevan, who appears to have acted alone, has only
$160,000 of income for which he has not adequately accounted. <br>
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But, if the institution the Volcker report describes is not fundamentally
dishonest or out of control, as the right-wing lynch mob would have it,
neither is it healthy. It is, if anything, an explicitly subservient body
that has grown habituated to serving the interests and the whims of its
member-states and understands all too well that all decisions are, at
bottom, political. This is a pathology in which the members and the
professionals of the Secretariat join equally and that undermines the
organization's good efforts. Whether and to what extent it is curable is
an open, and very important, question. <br><br>
<br><br>
Sanctions are a popular tool of multilateral statecraft, but not because
they work. They tend to be used, as Simon Chesterman, a professor of
international law at New York University, says, "where there's
enough political will to do more than denounce the situation, but not
enough to actually do something about the situation." The Iraqi
sanctions were the biggest, the most complex, and the longest-lasting
ever implemented by the United Nations. The fact that they turned out to
be porous and manipulable is thus much less surprising than the fact that
they worked at all. <br><br>
Iraq was placed under what are known as "comprehensive"
sanctions--a total embargo on trade that aims, in effect, to starve an
adversary into submission. The Oil-for-Food Programme was designed to
cure, or at least mitigate, the inevitable consequences of such a drastic
sanctions regime. In the Kurdish areas, where the United Nations
controlled the flow of goods made possible by the program, health and
nutrition returned largely to prewar levels. The effect was less
ameliorative elsewhere in Iraq, because Saddam used his control over
distribution to siphon off the supplies and thus preserve the propaganda
weapon of mass suffering. Nevertheless, the threat of starvation and
epidemic receded--as did the threat to the sanctions themselves, which
had been sustained by a genuine global consensus on the dangers posed by
Saddam's regime. The sanctions not only kept the inspectors rooting out
Saddam's WMD programs--at least through 1998, when Saddam kicked them out
of the country--but also deprived him of the revenue he needed to rebuild
his war machine and threaten his neighbors. Kenneth Pollack, the former
Clinton administration official who helped convince many wavering
Democrats to support the war by arguing that sanctions had given Iraq
cover to reconstitute its WMD programs, now concedes that "the
combination of inspections backed by powerful sanctions worked in
disarming Iraq." <br><br>
Among the unintended victims of the sanctions blunderbuss were Iraq's
neighbors, several of whom were important U.S. allies. Iraq served as an
indispensable source of cheap oil for Jordan, Turkey, and Syria.
Throughout the '90s, starting well before the Oil-for-Food Programme was
established, a continuous caravan of tankers illegally carried Iraqi oil
across the country's borders. The United Nations could do nothing about
this, and the United States made no attempt to stop the trade. "We
were not going to address the Jordanian smuggling," says Pollack,
who oversaw the Oil-for-Food Programme for the White House from 1999 to
2001. "In the case of Turkey, we tried a couple of times, but the
Turks made a horrific stink. We weren't going to keep fighting, because
we felt we had bigger fish to fry"--maintaining the inspections, the
no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, and the sanctions
themselves. <br><br>
It is this illicit trade in oil, accepted and even protected by three
successive U.S. administrations, that accounts for the enormous numbers
associated with the Oil-for-Food "theft." This past November,
Senator Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the Senate
subcommittee investigating the program, issued a set of calculations
purporting to show that Saddam had stolen a stupefying $21.3 billion
under the cover of the U.N. program. This was transparently disingenuous,
since two-thirds of the total consisted of oil-smuggling over which, as
Coleman must have known, the United Nations had no jurisdiction.
Volcker's report is conclusive on this score: "[T]he major source of
external financial resources to the Iraqi Regime resulted from sanctions
violations outside the Programme's framework." <br><br>
Nevertheless, even subtracting these very large sums, billions of dollars
were stolen from the program, principally in the form of kickbacks on the
goods Iraq purchased with its oil revenue. (The Volcker panel estimates
this figure at $1.7 to $2.5 billion; the Coleman committee suggests a
much splashier $7.5 billion.) The scam was perfectly straightforward:
Iraqi officials instructed contractors delivering food, medicine, trucks,
water-purification plants, and the like to add 10 percent to the actual
price, and then to wire a payment equal to the extra sum to an account
controlled by Iraq. How did the United Nations manage to miss this
systematic cheating? The principal allegations have been that either U.N.
officials, above all Benon Sevan (who ran the Office of the Iraq
Programme), or Cotecna (the firm that was hired in late 1998 to inspect
goods as they crossed the border) turned a blind eye, presumably in
exchange for bribes. The Volcker panel will deal with these issues in a
later report. <br><br>
The Oil-for-Food Programme, which, over the years of its existence,
monitored the sale of $64 billion in oil and the purchase of a
corresponding amount of goods, was an enormous technical and financial
exercise that, on the evidence of the Volcker report, occasionally
overwhelmed the U.N.'s modest managerial capacity. Yet responsibility for
the program lay not with Kofi Annan and his aides, but with the Security
Council. The Council administers sanctions programs: Whenever it votes to
impose such a punishment, it establishes a committee, consisting of
representatives of the members, to administer the sanctions and then
draws on the Secretariat for staff. Sevan periodically briefed Deputy
Secretary-General Louise Frechette on Oil-for-Food, but he reported to
the Council. <br><br>
The Security Council members, who received the contracts from Sevan's
office for approval, were well aware of Saddam's schemes, if not of their
systematic nature. One ambassador of a current Council member-state says
that "the committee was aware of the risk of abuse" and
understood that many contracts contained "not just inappropriate
stuff, but stuff which was incorrectly invoiced"--though he added
that many of the contracts were so mind-numbingly long and detailed that
it was often almost impossible to unravel the secret thread. Pollack
says, "We did not know the number, and we could not be certain that
this was going on. But everyone knew in his bones that this was the case;
we had enough anecdotal reports about companies striking deals with the
Iraqis." <br><br>
Both Pollack and a British official say that they tried to block some
particularly egregious examples of fraud. But the fact remains that
neither the United States nor the United Kingdom ever officially vetoed a
contract over concerns about fraudulent pricing. In fact, the U.N. Office
of the Iraq Programme brought instances of suspicious pricing to the
attention of the sanctions committee on 70 or so occasions; none of those
contracts, however, were ultimately blocked. The U.N. professionals, in
other words, were focusing on the merits, while the five permanent
members of the Security Council were making political decisions according
to their own priorities. A team of analysts at the State Department pored
over every contract for signs of "dual-use" items that might
have a hidden military purpose, often placing contracts on hold for
months. The French, the Russians, and the Chinese, whether out of
humanitarian or commercial or merely anti-American calculations, did
everything to keep the pipeline full. <br><br>
Officials from the major countries understood the game in all its
complexity and cynicism. It was ugly, but it worked. And then, in
retrospect, the whole contraption was reduced to ... Kofigate. Many
diplomats were revolted by the brutal attack conservatives launched
against the United Nations--though not, of course, revolted enough to say
so in public. In early December 2004, at the monthly lunch Annan holds
with the Security Council, Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador,
shattered the ritual pieties by saying, "It is an abomination to
blame the secretary-general and the Secretariat for something supposedly
on the order of $20 billion when the sanctions committee was fully aware
of what was happening, and the committee as a whole was unwilling to do
anything about it." Jones Parry pointed out that, in 2001, when the
British sponsored a resolution to put a stop to oil-smuggling, the Bush
administration was quite content to let it die. <br><br>
<br><br>
How did Oil-for-Food swell from a kind of sanctions prosthesis to a
scandal of worldhistorical proportions? The steady drip of ugly
revelations--Saddam's personally approved list of recipients of Iraqi oil
vouchers, the kickback scheme, and, of course, the unspooling and
deliciously circumstantial narrative of Kojo Annan--would certainly have
gotten the United Nations in hot water. But the scandal was also a
heaven-sent gift for conservatives. The unilateralist wing of the
Republican Party has long fumed at the idea that the United States must
seek "legitimacy" for its actions from the U.N. Security
Council. For many of them, the U.N.'s failure to offer that precious good
in the case of the war against Iraq constituted an irreparable breach,
compounded when Kofi Annan declared the war "illegal" and then
criticized the planned assault on Falluja two days before the U.S.
presidential election. For conservatives, Oil-for-Food was the rope with
which the United Nations was to hang itself. <br><br>
It was this wish to marginalize the United Nations, or at least to reap
the political benefit of U.N.-bashing, that explains the wild hyperbole
over the numbers, the refusal to distinguish between the United Nations
and its members, and, finally, the demands for Annan's head. The
Kofi-must-go movement peaked in early December, when Coleman wrote an
op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling on Annan to resign. Coleman
insisted that Annan was stonewalling the investigations, though he
furnished no evidence that this was so. Senator Carl Levin, the
committee's ranking Democrat, was so incensed that he appeared on CNN the
following day to praise Annan's cooperation and to say that the
subcommittee had received no evidence of impropriety on Annan's part.
<br><br>
Annan was especially vulnerable because of his feckless son. Much about
the Kojo story does, in fact, invite suspicion: He worked as a consultant
for Cotecna; his contract was first said to have ended in December 1998,
the month Cotecna won the goods-inspection contract, and then turned out
to have lasted another year; still later it was revealed that Kojo had
been paid $2,500 a month for four more years as part of a
"non-compete agreement"; and, finally, he billed Cotecna for
$54,700 in expenses in 1998, many of them run up at U.N. events. All this
could mean ... what? "Did Kojo inform Sevan about the fees,"
William Safire wondered in November, "or know about any lucrative
oil vouchers given by Saddam to Sevan?" Need we even ask? As Fox
News commentator John Gibson blithely affirmed, "Annan's son was in
on the scam." <br><br>
And yet, in the avalanche of documents being leaked to the press, and in
the whole corpus of information available to investigators, nothing has
yet appeared to corroborate these speculations. Until recently,
investigators for the Volcker panel believed that the Kojo story was all
smoke and no fire. Now they appear to have found some evidence connecting
Kojo to the Oil-for-Food Programme, as well as evidence casting doubt on
Kofi Annan's claims that he knew next to nothing of his son's activities.
It's not clear how serious any of this material will prove to be. The
panel will produce a report on Kojo's activities several weeks from now.
<br><br>
<br><br>
The most fascinating--and, for the United Nations, perhaps the most
discomfiting--passage in the Volcker report is its discussion of the
selection in 1996 of a bank to hold Iraq's oil revenue in escrow and of
firms to inspect the movement of oil and of goods. These were decisions
made by the Secretariat, not by the Security Council, but the report's
narrative shines a floodlight on the perverse relation between the two.
The United Nations had a minutely detailed procurement policy designed to
ensure a meritocratic choice of contractor. Accordingly, responsible
officials solicited bids and drew up lists of the banks and inspection
firms with the most experience, the best record, and the lowest cost.
And, in each case, officials higher up the chain chose a less qualified
firm. Why? In minutes of a meeting of the Iraq Steering Group from August
13, 1996, Chinmaya Gharekhan, one of then-Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali's closest advisers, said, "Everything about
implementation of 986 [the Oil-for-Food resolution] was 'political,' and
no aspect could be assessed purely on its merits. The Secretariat had
come under terrible pressure from member-states; the selection of [oil]
overseers, the bank, and the firm to supply oil inspection agents had all
been political." <br><br>
Reading these narratives, it is not always clear whether the Secretariat
is reacting to pressure from members or has so thoroughly internalized
this political dynamic that the pressure is superfluous. Boutros-Ghali
appears to decide in advance that the escrow bank should be
French--perhaps because the Iraqis won't accept an American or British
one, nor the Americans a Swiss one--and instructs the French ambassador
to draw up a list of interested French banks. Once Banque Nationale de
Paris wins the contract, despite numerous demerits, members of the
Steering Committee, which includes many of Boutros-Ghali's chief aides,
conclude that it would be "unacceptable" to award the contract
for goods inspection to a French firm as well, even though a French firm
is the lowest bidder. Instead, they invoke a clause allowing merit
considerations to be overruled by the "interests of the
Organization," which they understand to mean keeping important
members happy. They decide to award the contract to Lloyd's of London.
<br><br>
It is instructive to compare the behavior of Boutros-Ghali's top aides to
that of Sevan. According to the Volcker report, Sevan repeatedly
solicited Iraqi officials for allocations of oil on behalf of an Egyptian
trader; in one case, the Iraqis granted the requests immediately after
Sevan talked to them about his hopes to expand access to spare parts for
their oil industry. This behavior is so shocking that many U.N. officials
I know simply refused to believe it until the Volcker report appeared--a
reaction that suggests that it is, in fact, aberrational. The deference
to members and their political calculations, on the other hand, is an
institutional reflex, not only in procurement matters but in personnel
decisions and, ultimately, in the most fundamental matters. <br><br>
At a press briefing after the Volcker panel released the interim report,
Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's new chief of staff, was asked if the report
should be read as "an indictment of United Nations culture."
Malloch Brown was candid enough to concede that "the culture of
political complicity" was a serious problem. Members, he said,
should "back off and allow us to manage this organization." But
will they back off? Can they? The United Nations is an instrument to be
used by its members; it matters insofar as states are willing and able to
use it to express their common will, which is to say, their political
objectives. The Iraq sanctions committee was a perfect example of the
organization's possibilities and its limitations: There was just barely
enough common ground for the United States and the United Kingdom on the
one hand, and France, Russia, and China on the other, to satisfy their
conflicting political objectives without the process breaking down
altogether. U.N. officials could do little more than watch and deal with
the consequences. <br><br>
Powerlessness breeds passivity; U.N. officials rail against their
dependent status while at the same time taking refuge in it. If a
peacekeeping operation goes wrong, for example, it's because the Security
Council refused to give the troops a robust mandate. The members
micromanage the budget, protect useless fiefdoms, and demand even
low-level jobs for their citizens. It's all true, but it fosters a
culture in which no one feels personally accountable. <br><br>
Is it possible to foster a culture of accountability and professionalism
in an organization that must be so acutely responsive to the wishes of
its masters? Is it possible, for example, to fill jobs with the best
candidates so long as the principle of "equitable national
distribution" must be honored? If the answer is no, then we need to
envision other kinds of organization. People who care about the United
Nations will have to demand a change in culture, but also permit a change
in culture. The members will, in fact, have to back off on managerial
issues. The United States will have to stop trying to starve and
intimidate the United Nations into submission. And the organization's
managers will have to behave as if they had the kind of autonomy and
authority they seek. If the Oil-for-Food scandal ultimately provokes
these changes, the United Nations should be grateful for its
enemies.<br><br>
<br>
James Traub is writing a book on Kofi Annan and the United Nations.
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<font size=1>"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any
system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and
studying each part by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on
the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true
of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between
science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of
its various parts." --Max Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
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