Senior Fellow John R. Bolton

John R. Bolton reviews Backstabbing for Beginners, by Michael Soussan.

Barack Obama spent a good part of his campaign telling us that the United States needs to "restore" its good name in the world and, toward that end, to renew its commitment to "dialogue" and to the imperatives of international organizations like the United Nations. Whomever Mr. Obama picks as his U.N. ambassador, though, may first want to take a look at Michael Soussan's Backstabbing for Beginners. Mr. Soussan is hardly a knuckle-dragging U.N. basher--a dozen years ago, he was just as enamored with the U.N. as the president-elect is today. Then, in 1997, the Danish-born recent graduate of Brown University, longing to "make a difference," leapt at the chance to work for the organization. But three years of up-close experience in the U.N.'s aid program for Iraq, which came to be known as Oil for Food, soon opened his eyes.

The Oil for Food program was designed to permit Saddam Hussein's government, then operating under U.N. sanctions, to use the proceeds from limited oil sales to purchase food and other necessities for the Iraqi people. But as Mr. Soussan shows in compelling detail, the program degenerated into a swamp of corruption, indifferent oversight and de facto support for Saddam's malevolent rule.

Remarkably, despite his revulsion over the Oil for Food fiasco, Mr. Soussan declares that his "faith in the need for international governance" remains strong. Americans could be pardoned for having the opposite reaction, especially when the author extends his criticism of the U.N. beyond Oil for Food, observing, for instance, that the General Assembly's "greatest achievement is to approve its own budget." Nonetheless, it is precisely Mr. Soussan's unshakable belief in the benefits of "international governance" that makes his reporting on the U.N. so devastating.

Maybe he imagines some future group of nations that will live up to the U.N. Charter, because his views regarding the current one are unequivocal: "I was glad I was no longer working for an organization that valued its employees most dearly for their ability to hide their eyes, cover their ears, and shut their mouths in the face of gross incompetence and corruption." What U.N. skeptic could put it better?

Mr. Soussan explains how the U.N. Secretariat's highest levels--and specifically former Secretary General Kofi Annan--allowed the Oil for Food program to be commandeered by Saddam Hussein and deformed to fit his dictatorial needs. While inattention, incompetence and mismanagement undoubtedly played major roles in this debacle, the real key was that neither top U.N. officials nor much of its staff supported the Security Council's economic sanctions against Iraq in the first place. Accordingly, the U.N.'s own Oil for Food administrators were happy to see the sanctions effectively undermined. It was a stance politically facilitated by outright subversion of the sanctions by Council members such as Russia and France.

Backstabbing for Beginners points out, for example, that the U.N. personnel monitoring the distribution of Oil for Food's humanitarian supplies in Iraq were effectively under Saddam's control, although they never admitted as much. U.N. agencies had "gone native" in Iraq, Mr. Soussan reports, and they fell into line with the regime's insistence that "sanctions on Iraq should be lifted immediately."

Mr. Soussan says that his "college newspaper had a better fact-checking mechanism than our UN observers in Iraq." In one meeting in Baghdad, he says, the U.N. personnel "sounded exactly like Iraqi government officials." Indeed, Denis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq at the start of the Oil for Food program, complained that the U.S. had effectively hijacked the U.N., turning it into a "dark joke" and a "malignant force."

The posturing by U.N. staff members persisted even though they knew full well that whatever hardships and inequities existed in Iraq were not caused by the sanctions but by Saddam's control over the distribution of humanitarian supplies. "It was clear to everybody," Mr. Soussan writes, "that the hospitals in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit had their stocks full and the hospitals in the Shiite south remained chronically underprovisioned." In the face of massive evidence, neither the Secretariat nor the Council did anything about such abuses--fully justifying Oil for Food investigator Paul Volcker's later conclusion that the U.N. was gripped by a "culture of inaction."

Even worse, Mr. Soussan shows, "the team around Kofi Annan . . . had discreetly allied themselves with the positions of the anti-sanctions activists." In full public view, Mr. Annan disdained "merely" implementing Security Council resolutions, the Secretary General's principal responsibility under the U.N. Charter. Mr. Annan had higher goals in mind: He had his aides convey to the ever-receptive media that the U.N. secretary general was essentially a "secular pope," a role he very much saw himself embodying.

While Mr. Annan and his subordinates both undercut the sanctions against Iraq and declined to take responsibility for the unraveling Oil for Food program, the secretary general himself was off pursuing what he called his "sacred duty"--his February 1998 trip to Baghdad to beg Saddam Hussein to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. Returning to a stage-managed welcome home at the U.N., Mr. Annan announced to his employees that, in Baghdad, "he had been surrounded by 'the world's prayers.' "

Obviously those prayers didn't accomplish much, because Saddam quickly reverted to type, bullying the weapons inspectors and refusing to comply with Council resolutions. His intransigence prompted the Clinton administration's inadequate Operation Desert Fox, a retaliatory four-day bombing operation in December 1998. Keeping his eye on his own halo, Mr. Annan said of Desert Fox: "This is a sad day for the United Nations and the world. It is also a very sad day for me personally."

Sad for him, no doubt, because what Mr. Annan and many in the U.N. desired--as they still do--is autonomy from the direction or influence of the very member governments that constitute and fund the U.N. system. Given the sorry example of the U.N. in action described by Mr. Soussan, Backstabbing for Beginners has put the fledgling Obama administration unambiguously on notice.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.