ChasingtheFlame

At Headquarters in New York, UN senior staff had spent months debating whether and how they should be involved in the postwar “peace.”Annan feared that Washington’s marginalization of the UN over Iraq would detract from the organization’s overall global relevance, and this made him eager to find a way to get UN international staff back to Iraq as soon as possible. With his senior advisers he repeatedly stressed, “We have to prove we can do something useful.” Mark Malloch Brown, Vieira de Mello’s friend from their days together at UNHCR and now the head of the UN Development Program, agreed, arguing, “For Iraq’s sake, for the world’s sake, and for the UN’s sake, we can’t sit this out.” As Malloch Brown remembers,“There were lots of tactical conversations about how much of our virginity to lose, but the overwhelming majority of us felt that, if you’re the fire brigade, you don’t ask who started the fire and whether it is a moral fire before you get involved.”

The under-secretaries-general for peacekeeping and political affairs, Jean-Marie Guéhenno and Kieran Prendergast, were more cautious.“It isn’t written anywhere in stone that the UN has to be deployed to every crisis,” said Guéhenno. Prendergast, who was strongly influenced by his American special assistant, forty-year-old Rick Hooper, argued that it was a mistake to chase “a role for role’s sake.” Hooper, who had attended the University of Damascus and spoke flawless Arabic, was known in UN circles for his strong views on Middle Eastern politics and for combining operational and strategic thinking. “We should look for the UN’s comparative advantage,” Hooper urged, “and not simply pick up whatever crumbs are thrown at us.”

It seemed likely that Washington would eventually need to involve the UN, because the U.S. welcome would wear thin in Iraq, because a U.S. occupation would harm U.S. standing internationally, or because the United States would not want to foot the bill for Iraq’s reconstruction on its own. Vieira de Mello participated in these high-level UN discussions by speakerphone from Geneva. He believed that the Bush administration would turn back to the UN as soon as it achieved its military objectives. He knew better than anybody just how hard it was to manage postwar transitions, and he knew that the United States did not have the in-house expertise necessary to reintegrate the Iraqi military, facilitate the return of refugees, or plan elections. Whenever he was asked whether the Iraq war signaled the end of the UN, he would say of the Americans, “They will come back.” ¹

Since late 2002 the British had been pressing the Americans to give the UN a prominent political role after the war. British prime minister Tony Blair, President Bush’s most trusted Coalition partner, knew that British voters were unenthusiastic about U.S. plans to run Iraq unilaterally. Polls in the Daily Telegraph showed that while British support for the war had risen to a high of 66 percent, only 2 percent of those polled supported the establishment of an American-controlled administration afterward. ² On April 3, two weeks into the war, British foreign secretary Jack Straw presented Secretary of State Colin Powell with a detailed “day after” occupation plan that envisaged the appointment of a powerful UN special envoy. ³ If the UN ran the show, the plan showed, instead of paying for the occupation, the United States would be charged just 20 percent of the cost (its share of the UN peacekeeping budget). ⁴ France and Germany naturally favored the British plan because, having opposed the war, they were dead set against the idea of leaving the Americans in charge of Iraq. France had proposed an arrangement like that after the 1999 Kosovo war, in which NATO had run the military operation and the UN, initially under Vieira de Mello, had overseen the political administration. ⁵

But the Bush administration rejected the British approach. The U.S. attitude was “We aren’t going to expend blood and treasure to have you decide who runs Iraq.” Bush’s top advisers did not think highly of the UN, both because of the Security Council’s refusal to endorse the war and because they looked down upon the UN’s past performances in the Balkans, Rwanda, Kosovo, and even East Timor, which elsewhere was seen as a success. ⁶ In a speech in February 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld had said that the United States intended to avoid the kind of “nation-building” that the UN did. He faulted the UN performance in Kosovo.“They issue postage stamps, passports, driver’s licenses, and the like,” he said, “and decisions made by the local parliament are invalid without the signatures of the UN administrators.” ⁷ In poverty-stricken East Timor, he continued, the UN had caused the capital city of Dili to become “one of the most expensive cities in Asia.” Restaurants there “cater to international workers who have salaries that are some two hundred times the average local wage,” he said.“In the city’s main supermarkets prices are reportedly on a par with London and New York.” ⁸ Rumsfeld seemed to believe that the United States would simply be able to dislodge Saddam Hussein and walk away without itself getting involved in Iraqi affairs.

In thinking about the war’s aftermath, other U.S. officials believed that they faced a trade-off between legitimacy and control, and they expressed a clear preference for control. Even Secretary Powell was insistent. “The Coalition, having taken the political risk and having paid the cost in lives, must have a leading role,” he said. ⁹ Three weeks into the war, after their third summit in as many weeks, Bush and Blair could only agree that “the United Nations has a vital role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq.” ¹⁰ Neither man specified what “vital role” meant. When journalists pressed Bush to clarify the meaning of the phrase, he grew irritated. “Evidently there’s some skepticism here in Europe about whether or not I mean what I say,” Bush said. “Saddam Hussein clearly knows I mean what I say. And a vital role for the United Nations means a vital role for the United Nations.” ¹¹ Paul Wolfowitz was more concrete, saying that the UN would perform humanitarian tasks. “The UN can be an important partner,” the deputy secretary of defense said. “But it can’t be the managing partner. It can’t be in charge.” ¹²

For all of their differences with Washington, Annan, Vieira de Mello, and other senior UN officials were actually in full agreement with the Bush administration that the UN should not run Iraq. In a March 21 memo, Annan’s top advisers argued that the UN should “resist and discourage” notions of a UN transitional administration, which would vastly exceed the UN’s capacity. In 2000 Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister, had released a highly touted report in which he culled the lessons of UN political and peacekeeping operations of the previous decade and concluded that the UN Secretariat needed to learn to “say no” to unachievable mandates. As Vieira de Mello had experienced firsthand in Bosnia and Kosovo, the UN too often took the fall for the wrongheaded decisions of the countries on the Security Council. When asked by a reporter whether the UN would be willing to run an Iraqi administration similar to those in East Timor and Kosovo, Annan replied, “Iraq is not East Timor and Iraq is not Kosovo. There are trained personnel, there is a reasonably effective civil service, there are engineers and others who can play a role in their own country.... Iraqis have to be responsible for their political future, and to control their own natural resources.” ¹³

As the speculation about the postwar phase began to heat up, Vieira de Mello began to wonder whether he might get pulled into the fray. His job in Geneva was frustrating him. In an e-mail to Peter Galbraith, he noted that he was still struggling to define his role, which was “not easy after three decades of operational, high-adrenaline stuff.” ¹⁴ He complained to a journalist that a “succession of appointments, of meetings, of trips, deprive me of my freedom.” ¹⁵ When Fabrizio Hochschild, his special assistant in Kosovo and East Timor, visited him in his plush new office, several times the size of his prior quarters, Hochschild brought his two-year-old son, Adam, who began playing in Vieira de Mello’s swirling desk chair. As the two friends got caught up, Adam suddenly began wailing at the top of his lungs. Hochschild did all he could to console him, but the boy cried on as if in agony. The high commissioner quipped, “At least someone knows how I feel.”

In March 2003, shortly after he met with Bush, Vieira de Mello traveled to Brussels, where his friend Omar Bakhet was working. Bakhet set up a meeting with Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, but in the middle of their discussion, Prodi drifted to sleep. Leaving the meeting, Vieira de Mello erupted. “Fuck, Omar, this is what we are doing with our lives, putting up with this kind of garbage. He wouldn’t dare do that if I represented a Western country.” Bakhet tried to make light of the incident. “How do you think I feel, Sergio? This is my life here. Normally I bring blankets to meetings.” But his friend did not laugh. Bakhet recalls,“I felt like the flame in Sergio was dying slowly inside him.”

Still, although office life had never suited him and he felt removed from the “action” on Iraq, Vieira de Mello was committed to finishing what he had started. He was planning a politically delicate trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories for the fall, and he was ready to use the political capital he had amassed in capitals throughout his career to elevate the profile of his office and of human rights. He was also determined to complete his divorce. When his name began to appear in the press as a possible candidate to be UN envoy in Iraq, he played it down. The April 1 edition of Development News, a World Bank publication, quoted a London Times article saying that the Americans saw him as their candidate. He forwarded the link to Larriera. “Here starts the speculation,” he wrote. “I must have serious enemies in the UK for someone to say this of me!” ¹⁶ Since he had only just arrived in Geneva to take up the post of human rights commissioner, he did not think Annan would even consider removing him. A few days later he e-mailed Larriera an invitation that had been sent to him from the mayor of Geneva, who on June 7 would be hosting a reception in order to open five hundred bottles of wine. “Some good news,” he wrote her. “Let’s go!” ¹⁷

On April 9, a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad. The mood on the thirty-eighth floor at UN Headquarters, where most people had opposed the war, was not celebratory. One of the few UN officials who had backed the invasion was sickened. “They couldn’t step back, even for one day, to rejoice in the end of Saddam’s tyranny,” the official recalls. The Americans were triumphant. On May 1, 2003, President Bush made his infamous proclamation in front of a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” ¹⁸ At a town hall meeting at a U.S. base in Qatar, an army officer asked Rumsfeld whether he had been “bombarded with apologetic phone calls” from his “doom and gloom” critics. Amid much laughter and applause, Rumsfeld responded: “There were a lot of hand-wringers around, weren’t there? You know, during World War II, I think Winston Churchill was talking about the Battle of Britain, and he said, ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’ A humorist in Washington the other day sent me a note paraphrasing that, and he said, ‘Never have so many been so wrong about so much.’ But I would never say that.” ¹⁹

Vieira de Mello hoped that the smugness of American decision-makers would be matched by competence on the ground. Battlefield success did not automatically translate into long-term stability, as the United States was already learning in Afghanistan. He was all too aware of how quickly progress could be reversed. As retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, said later, referring to the swift U.S. success in the initial conventional war in Iraq: “Ohio State beat Slippery Rock sixty-two to nothing. No shit.” ²⁰ Whether the American and British invasion would prove a lasting success would turn on whether the Americans could provide physical and economic security for Iraqis. And in this regard Vieira de Mello took note of the fact that nobody he had talked to at the UN, in Europe, or in the Bush administration seemed to be able to answer an essential question: After Saddam was defeated, who would run Iraq?

Administration officials had initially suggested that an Iraqi interim authority (split between Iraqi exiles and those who had stayed in Iraq and suffered under Saddam) would be chosen as soon as Coalition troops secured the country. ²¹ After a summit meeting with Prime Minister Blair in April, President Bush said, “I hear a lot of talk here about how we’re going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it. From day one, we have said the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country . . . It is a cynical world that says it’s impossible for the Iraqis to run themselves.” ²² After his meeting with Bush in March, Vieira de Mello had met with National Security Adviser Rice, who told him that Washington hoped “very soon to identify technocrats who can help run the country.” She had insisted that people who claimed that President Bush intended to appoint a military governor “do not know what they are taking about,” adding, “We have no desire to be in Iraq longer than necessary.” ²³ Publicly, she said, “If Afghanistan is any guide, the people themselves will tell you, well, that person has been a leader.” ²⁴ As late as mid-May the Bush administration still imagined having a transitional Iraqi government composed of Iraqi exiles and internals in place by the end of the month. ²⁵

Jay Garner, a sixty-five-year-old retired U.S. general who was to manage the civilian side of the U.S. postwar presence, did not arrive in Baghdad until April 21, twelve days after Baghdad’s fall. He was told that, in advance of the creation of the new Iraqi government, he would preside over twenty-three ministries—each of which would be headed by an American with Iraqi assistance. These ministries would keep the country running until normalcy returned. The Americans had ambitious but limited objectives. They wanted to remove Saddam Hussein and his henchmen and decapitate the Ba’athist terror apparatus. And in the wake of Saddam’s overthrow, they wanted to see Iraqi institutions up and running “under new management.”

When Vieira de Mello was administrator in East Timor, he had taken care to live unobtrusively and to shun a dignitary’s siren. By contrast, Garner traveled around in a GMC Suburban, trailed by a convoy of nine Humvees and three security vehicles filled with Coalition troops. Garner did try to convey to Iraqis that they would control their own destiny. Visiting a power station that had been destroyed by vandals, Garner was asked if he was the new ruler of Iraq.“The new ruler of Iraq is an Iraqi,” the American said without elaborating. ²⁶ Garner was winging it. The only formal plan he had been given was a twenty-five-page paper, dated April 16, 2003, entitled “A Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq.” It began: “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.” ²⁷

The Coalition’s “post-hostilities” performance did not begin well. Iraq’s infrastructure was far shoddier than U.S. planners had expected. Compounding matters was that, in the days after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi gangs had carried out widespread looting, gutting seventeen of the twenty-three ministries, burning the Iraqi National Library (destroying more than one million books), stripping hospitals of their equipment and medicines, and smashing and stealing antiquities from the National Museum. ²⁸ Secretary Rumsfeld was widely quoted dismissing the significance of the lootings, saying, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” ²⁹ But images of the U.S. military in Iraq standing by helplessly— failing to declare martial law or impose a curfew—were beamed throughout Iraq, the region, and the world. ³⁰ The scenes were not different from those Vieira de Mello had seen in Kosovo when NATO soldiers had refused to prevent Kosovar gunmen from looting Serb villages. But the stakes in Iraq, a country of 27 million in the most volatile region in the world, were far higher.

In early May, with chaos afoot, President Bush announced that he was replacing Garner with sixty-one-year-old L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, who had served as ambassador to the Netherlands, ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, and, more recently, managing director at Kissinger Associates. Henceforth he would head a newly created body called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). ³¹ On May 8 John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, and Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador there, sent a letter to the Security Council in which they spelled out the responsibilities of the CPA. This was the first written word that UN officials received that the American and British invaders—and not Iraqis—were in fact going to govern Iraq and provide for the “responsible administration of the Iraqi financial sector.” ³²

Most Iraqis were shocked. “Until the creation of the CPA, we thought we were going to run our own country. That’s what the Americans had been telling us,” recalls Adnan Pachachi, a leading Iraq exile who had served in the 1960s as Iraqi ambassador to the UN. In April Pachachi had attended two large meetings of returning Iraqi exiles and local Iraqis who believed that they were debating the composition of a new Iraqi government. They were thus blindsided by the Bush administration’s decision to make Bremer the effective ruler of the country. On May 19, in response to the indefinite postponement of Iraqi sovereignty, the militant young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr brought some ten thousand protesters to the streets of Baghdad in the largest gathering since the arrival of U.S. forces six weeks before. The crowd denounced Bremer’s announcement that Iraqi self-government would be postponed. “No to foreign administration,” they chanted. “Yes, yes to Islam.” ³³

Bremer swept into Iraq as the anti-Garner. If Garner, with his khakis and golf shirts, was deferential and hesitant, Bremer, dressed in his business suits and combat boots, was firm and swift. If Garner went out of his way to insist that as-yet-unidentified “Iraqis” were in charge, Bremer showed instantly that he was. Only he, “the administrator,” had the power to sign laws, which were called “orders.”

The success of any U.S. administration in Iraq was handicapped by decisions made before Bremer’s time. The Pentagon had decided to attempt to man the “peace” with only 130,000 troops, an impossibility in a country so large. The White House had opted to make the Pentagon the lead agency in the postwar period, thereby sidelining the U.S. government’s only intellectual capital on governance, development, and reconstruction: that of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. And the Iraqi looting rampage that had begun in early April had ravaged basic services and greatly eroded Iraqi confidence in the Coalition.

But Bremer was also the victim of the orders he issued on arrival. On May 16, only four days after he landed in Baghdad, he issued a fateful edict that would change Iraq forever: He banned Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party and forbade senior party members from participating in public life. While Garner had said he would punish only the leading culprits in the Ba’ath party, Bremer’s order targeted the top four levels of the party, whose numbers ranged between 1 million and 2.5 million. The de-Ba’athification order, which was modeled on the de-Nazification process after World War II, was said to have come from the White House. ³⁴ The effect of the measure was immediate. Bureaucrats and technocrats who knew how to operate the ministries of health, transportation, and communications were replaced by “fifth stringers,” in the words of Coalition official Stephen Browning, who attempted to run the ministry of health. “Nobody who was left knew anything.” ³⁵ While in World War II the Allies had left most German institutions in place, getting rid of only the most culpable Nazis, Iraq’s core institutions (schools, hospitals, social services, telecommunications, police, courtrooms) were not merely decapitated and left awaiting senior leadership; they were gutted to the point that they could not meet the daily needs of Iraq’s citizens. Low-level Ba’ath party officials were told that they could appeal, but the mechanisms to hear their appeals would not be set up for many months.

A week later Bremer announced his second fatal move: the disbanding of the Iraqi army. More than 400,000 Iraqi soldiers and officers, only some of whom were actually loyal to the previous regime and most of whom had families to support, were let go. ³⁶ Bremer justified the move on the grounds that he was only formalizing a dissolution that had already occurred spontaneously. But in a matter of days the CPA had dissolved the two primary instruments for governing the country. The seeds for Iraq’s implosion had been planted.

In advance of the resolution’s passage, one diplomat noted how radical the resolution was. “The Security Council would be legitimizing the occupation of the territory and state functions of one member by a group of other members,” he said. “That has never happened before.” ³⁸ “Occupation was a goldmine,” recalls a U.S. official. “The UN and the Europeans wanted us to accept our responsibilities as occupying powers, and by doing so, we got things we never thought we’d get through the Council: oil revenues, day-to-day functioning of ministries, power over the armed forces. We were thrilled. We hadn’t found a way to legally get at Iraqi oil until the UN led us there. It was a dream come true for the Pentagon. The Europeans didn’t really understand what we were getting out of the resolution. It was only much later that they went, ‘Fuck, we voted for this thing?’ ”

The one aspect of the resolution that the Europeans could point to as a U.S. concession was the appointment of a UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq who would play a role in setting up an “Iraqi interim administration.” Still, even this UN envoy was made subservient to the Coalition. He had none of the powers of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Afghanistan who had helped select that country’s first president. Annan’s advisers were split on whom he should choose to fill the limited role. Several of them believed that he should send a junior official, a person whose rank was more commensurate with the minimal responsibilities that the Coalition seemed willing to offer the UN.“Are the Americans actually going to create a space for us to play a political role,” Under-Secretary-General Prendergast asked, “or are they intent on doing everything themselves and just appropriating the UN decal?” He urged Annan to select an Arabic speaker. “If a mob comes toward you, and you don’t understand what they’re saying, you can’t even read the road signs in the place, you’re going to be in trouble,” he argued. The British, who still hoped the UN could play a truly vital role in Iraq, urged Annan to appoint a high-profile UN envoy. Annan told Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, that he was considering appointing the former president of Costa Rica. Greenstock shook his head and advised, “We are really talking about Sergio.”

Annan was not yet persuaded. He was leaning toward appointing Kamel Morjane, the Arabic-speaking senior UNHCR official who then held the post that Vieira de Mello had once held at UNHCR, that of assistant high commissioner for refugees. But on May 16 Morjane read a New York Times story by Elizabeth Becker, who quoted a senior diplomat on the Security Council saying that Vieira de Mello was “the man Washington wants.” The two friends met in Geneva’s Old Town for Sunday morning coffee, and Morjane told him, “Sergio, be careful. Even if you end up having to go to Iraq, this kind of publicity is not good for you. If the interveners are endorsing you, you will be seen as their tool.” Vieira de Mello agreed. “I know,” he said. “Kamel, if you are my friend, you will tell everyone you know that I don’t want to go.”

Vieira de Mello was torn. He took seriously the line in his contract that required him to serve wherever the secretary-general sent him. He also made no secret of missing the action. In Geneva he spent his days restructuring his office, meeting with diplomats, giving speeches on the centrality of human rights, and making recommendations to his small teams in the field. It was a desk job. He felt removed from Iraq, one of the most wrenching geopolitical crises of his lifetime. Although he had long ago stopped admitting his aspiration to become secretary-general, he must have known that his stock would rise significantly if he helped stabilize Iraq. He also knew that he was the best man for a bad mission and could, without arrogance, observe that he had more experience managing postconflict transitions than any other person in the UN system. He could tap these skills to serve the Iraqi people, who had suffered enough.

But for all the obvious appeal, a great deal held him back. He was just settling into his new job, and if he ran off to Iraq, the already-suspicious human rights community would pounce. He had just turned fifty-five and had finally begun to focus on his personal life. On May 16, the same day the Becker story appeared, Annie and he had appeared before a divorce tribunal. A year and a half after he first filed for a legal split, the judge ordered the division of the family property, giving Annie the house in Massongy and requiring Vieira de Mello to pay a substantial monthly stipend.

As the days passed and the countries on the Security Council refined the text of the resolution, Vieira de Mello saw that the odds that he would be summoned were increasing. So he took matters into his own hands: He telephoned Iqbal Riza, Annan’s chief of staff. “Iqbal, if my name comes up on lists for Iraq, please take it off,” he said. “I can’t go to Iraq. I need to finish my divorce. I can’t send that signal to the human rights community. And I didn’t believe in this war.” Riza told him that he understood and would oblige. In Vieira de Mello’s mind, the matter was settled. The day of his court appearance, Peter Galbraith, his colleague in East Timor and an expert on the Iraqi Kurds, sent him an e-mail offering to brief him on Iraq, and he wrote back, urging Galbraith not to believe what he read in the press, and stressing, “Hope not to need your briefing.” ⁴⁰ When Steven Erlanger of the New York Times inquired, he wrote back, “I can’t seriously drop my current (eight-month-old) job and go off on another adventure. Moreover, the mandate, as far as I can tell, does not look right to me.” ⁴¹

Riza told Morjane that he was on the short list for the job. Unlike Vieira de Mello, Morjane had close ties to his home government, Tunisia, and owing to the political sensitivities of an Arab national taking up a post in occupied Iraq, he would have to clear any such appointment with his president. “Going to Iraq for the UN would not be like going to Australia or Peru,” Morjane recalls. He quietly made arrangements to fly home to see President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali two days later.

On Sunday, May 18, Vieira de Mello went jogging around Lake Geneva with his assistant Jonathan Prentice. After the run, they sat in the grass to stretch, and Prentice urged his boss to face the inevitable, saying, “Sergio, it is going to happen.” But Vieira de Mello remained convinced that he would not be asked. “I really don’t think it will,” he said. “I’ve made it clear to the secretary-general that I don’t want to go.” The next day, he had lunch with his secretary, Carole Ray, who asked him to confirm the rumors that he was headed to Baghdad. “Carole, my dear, I’ve been in this job for eight months. What are the governments that backed me going to think if I bugger off to Iraq? So if you are counting on being part of another mission, forget it.” As the two got up to leave the UN cafeteria, however, he conceded, “If the old man tells me that I have to go, then I have no choice.”

Initially, when Secretary Powell pressed Annan to appoint Vieira de Mello, the secretary-general declined. “Sergio has a job,” Annan said. “And it is an important job which he has just started.” But Powell kept calling, and the British too kept up the chorus. Even though Annan was being pressured by the very two countries that had bypassed the Security Council to begin with, he did not feel as though he had many options.“If the U.S. secretary of state comes to say to you, ’We want Mr. Jones,’” says one UN official close to Annan, “your reasons for saying no better be more compelling than ‘He has a job’ or ‘He’s tired’ or ‘He needs to finalize his divorce.’ ”

Annan today insists that Vieira de Mello changed his mind about going to Iraq. “The Americans had gotten to him,” he recalls. But Vieira de Mello’s last official word on his possible appointment had been his phone call to Riza requesting that his name be taken off the short list. Contrary to Annan’s claim, senior Bush administration officials did not reach out to him directly. He never spoke with the president after their first meeting. ⁴² Only Kevin Moley, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva, paid him a visit. “It was ‘Hey, Sergio, we’d very much like you to do this,’” Moley remembers, “but it wasn’t anything more than that.” The Bush administration was conscious of the risks of exerting too much pressure. “It’s the kiss of death to be the U.S. candidate,” says Moley. “If Sergio was to go to Iraq, we wanted him to be seen as legitimate.”

On Wednesday, May 21, Vieira de Mello’s day at the Palais Wilson was packed with meetings, including a late-afternoon gathering with a dozen interns. One of his senior advisers tried to get him to cancel the session, but he refused. “Don’t take them off the agenda,” he said. “They work here for free. They deserve my time.” Much as Thomas Jamieson had enjoyed taking him out for long lunches three decades earlier, he now found it relaxing to chat with students and young human rights devotees. When Ray tried to end the meeting after twenty-five minutes, he demurred. “Give me a little more time,” he said. Fifteen minutes later, when Ray returned and said Annan wanted to speak to him, he reluctantly rose from the table and walked out with her. “Was that a lie?” he asked. But he was in fact connected to Headquarters, and Annan asked him to fly to New York the next day. Vieira de Mello hung up the phone and turned to Ray. "I think they are going to ask me to Iraq,” he said. “Can I count on you to come for three months?”

Having explicitly asked to be taken off the list, something he had never done before in his career, he was frustrated that the UN system had such a thin layer of talent at the top that he was always the one whose life was disrupted. Others, like his Indian colleague Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor, seemed to glide up through the UN ranks without ever serving in a hardship post. “If this is such an important job,” he asked Prentice, “why the hell don’t they ever send Shashi? Why is it always me?” He telephoned Morjane, who was flying to Tunisia to speak with his president. “Kamel, the SG called me last night. I leave today for New York. If they put pressure on me and I can’t refuse, I’ll tell them I’ll do it for three months and you will succeed me.”

On Thursday, May 22, Vieira de Mello flew first class on the daytime flight from Geneva to New York. Before he departed, he and Prentice made calls to the Chinese ambassador to the UN in New York and to Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, asking them, in the event that he was named UN envoy to Iraq, to issue statements praising his appointment. He hoped that this would counter any notion that he was an American puppet by making it clear that he had broad support in the international community.

Prentice, who normally flew economy class, received an unexpected upgrade. He and Vieira de Mello spent the flight together in first class drinking champagne, feasting on lobster and fine cheeses, and poking fun at the draft Security Council resolution, which (in a long career of working with lousy mandates) was by far the worst Vieira de Mello had ever seen. “What the fuck does this mean?” he asked, pointing to the clause outlining the special representative’s functions. “I have no idea,” said Prentice.

While Vieira de Mello was flying, the countries with seats on the Security Council were meeting to vote on the final draft of the resolution. At 9:30 a.m. in New York, diplomats chatted amicably in the Council chamber and stared expectantly at the door, where they hoped the Syrian ambassador would appear. After a forty-minute delay and frequent cell phone calls, the ambassador never showed, and the fourteen other ambassadors voted unanimously in favor of Resolution 1483. ⁴³ Most midlevel UN staff were demoralized by the rush to endorse the U.S. and British occupation. One UN lawyer, Mona Khalil, put a screen saver up on her computer that read: “The UN Charter has left the building.” But Annan was personally pleased that the UN was “back in the game” and also relieved the Council had not asked the UN to administer the country. "I have always held that the unity of the Council is the indispensable foundation for effective action to maintain international peace and security,” he told reporters after the session. “We should all be gratified that the Council has come together.” ⁴⁴ Calling it a “foot-in-the-door resolution,” Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the UN Development Program, seconded Annan’s satisfaction. “It’s a very good resolution,” he said. ⁴⁵

The Europeans had swallowed giving the United States and Great Britain virtual control over Iraq’s oil revenues, and giving the UN vague and subservient tasks, but they put a positive spin on this occasion. They pointed to some ninety changes made to the original draft resolution as evidence of their influence. ⁴⁶ "The war that we did not want, and the majority of the Council did not want, has taken place,” German ambassador Gunter Pleuger said. “We cannot undo history. We are now in a situation where we have to take action for the sake of the Iraqi people.” ⁴⁷ The French did not think they had the option of opposing it. “We could have abstained from the resolution,” recalls one official at the French mission. “But we asked ourselves, what do we get by abstaining? We’ll be blamed for being anti-Iraqi and obstructing efforts at reconstruction. And if things go wrong, the United States will scapegoat us and say we obstructed what was necessary. We couldn’t give them another opportunity to blame us.”

When Iraqis got wind of the contents of the UN resolution, they were crushed. A month before the resolution Shiite militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had granted one of his first-ever interviews, to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post. When Shadid had asked al-Sadr whether Americans were occupiers or liberators, al-Sadr had been circumspect: “This is not a question to ask me,” he said. “It is a question to ask them. I don’t know their intentions. Only God does.” But with the passage of Resolution 1483, al-Sadr and millions of other Iraqis had their answer: It was an “occupation”; the UN resolution said so. The Arabic word for occupation, ihtilal, carried several damning resonances: the British occupation of Iraq (1915-1932), the Israeli occupation of Lebanon (1978-2000), and the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

With the passage of the resolution, all that was left to announce was who would be named the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq. When Vieira de Mello landed in New York, he phoned Larriera, who had been awaiting his arrival in her office at the UN. Together they rehearsed the arguments for not going to Iraq. “Repeat after me, Sergio: ‘I can say no. I am the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I’ve just started,’” Larriera said. He assured her, “I already told Riza to take me off the list. They probably just want to brainstorm about the other candidates.” He knew better.

He took a cab directly from Kennedy airport to Larriera’s tiny studio apartment on East Sixty-second Street, between First and Second avenues. He showered and then walked the five short blocks to Annan’s home. When the meeting began, they discussed the generic functions that the UN envoy in Iraq would have to perform. “He will have to serve as a bridge to the Coalition, but he will also have to distance himself from the Coalition,” Annan said. He would have to get out into the countryside and listen to what Iraqis were saying. And he would have to push the Coalition to develop a more transparent timetable for holding elections, drafting a constitution, and handing over full sovereignty to the Iraqis. The two men did not discuss the physical dangers in Iraq because, although looting was occurring, it looked as though Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard forces had been roundly defeated. Iraq seemed more peaceful than Bosnia and Kosovo had been when Vieira de Mello had risked his life as a UN envoy. Annan never asked him directly whether he would go, but after almost an hour of general discussion about the tasks that lay ahead, the secretary-general said, “So when are we going to announce your appointment?”

Gamal Ibrahim, Vieira de Mello’s former bodyguard, had not seen him since he became human rights commissioner the previous September. Ibrahim was leaving the UN to get a bite to eat when he spotted Vieira de Mello on the street coming from Annan’s home.“Stop the car,” Ibrahim told the person he was driving with. “Sergio? What are you doing here?” Vieira de Mello’s face brightened. “Gamal!” Ibrahim offered him a lift uptown to Larriera’s apartment. “The SG just told me I’m going to Baghdad,” Vieira de Mello said. Ibrahim was impressed. “That’s good for you, Mr. Sergio, good for your career,” he said. “What do you mean, Gamal? I’ve worked for the UN for thirty-four years. I’m going to retire in two or three years. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve done everything. I’m the High Commissioner for Human Rights. What career am I working for? What do I have left to prove?” Ibrahim was taken aback and asked, “So why are you going?” “Can you say no to your boss?” Vieira de Mello said. “I cannot say no to mine.” They arrived at Larriera’s apartment building.“We’ll talk later,” he said as he got out of the car. Ibrahim feared he knew what that meant and figured that he would be equally bad at refusing a job he didn’t want.

Larriera knew something had gone wrong when Vieira de Mello hadn’t called. When she telephoned her apartment from work, he answered. “They put it in such a way that I couldn’t say what we had planned I was going to say,” he blurted out. “But would you come with me?” She was stunned. “What do you mean?” she said. “They asked you to go to Iraq?”

He had accepted the job on two conditions. First, unlike his posting to East Timor, the Iraq assignment would not be prolonged. Annan had asked Vieira de Mello to serve for six months. Vieira de Mello had said three. And the two men had settled on a four-month term. Vieira de Mello would preside over a UN start-up mission, just as he had done in 1999 in Kosovo, and then he would hand the operation over to a more permanent special representative and return to Geneva to his full-time job as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He would not stay a day past his assigned tenure, he told Annan, “no matter what.” His second condition was nonnegotiable: Larriera would be part of his team.

The couple passed the evening in gloomy resignation. They had spent months plotting the next phase of their life together in Geneva, and suddenly their plans had been turned upside down. He had persuaded Annan to postpone the formal announcement so that they could enjoy a weekend of relative peace. Resolved to make the best of the time they had together in New York, she suggested that they leave her cramped apartment for a few hours and get dinner at one of their favorite restaurants. When they entered L’Absinthe, a brasserie on East Sixty-seventh Street, however, they spotted a crowd of UN colleagues inside. “No more UN tonight,” he said, spiriting her back outside.

Knowing he would be in high demand, he avoided Headquarters the next day for fear of being buttonholed. In Tunis his friend Kamel Morjane was meeting with President Ben Ali, who agreed to support his candidacy. “I have only one condition,” Ben Ali said. “If the secretary-general chooses you, I will give you a team from my own personal security detail. I will not let you go alone.” Morjane accepted the offer of additional security and telephoned Riza, who informed him that Annan had already chosen Vieira de Mello. Morjane’s pride was wounded, but he telephoned his friend to congratulate him. “Prepare yourself,” Vieira de Mello said. “I will not stay one day longer than four months, and you will replace me.” Morjane was disappointed. “The only person happy in my house was my wife,” he recalls. “But rationally I thought Sergio was the best man for the job, not only because of his skills, which were obvious, but also because he was the one UN person who might be able to influence the United States and the U.K. He’d be able to find the best space for the UN. There was nobody better than Sergio at finding that space.” Annan had come to the same conclusion. “At the end of the day everyone was hoping that 1483, with all of its absurdities, would be salvaged by Sergio himself,” recalls one UN official. “That was the whole plan: Sergio will fix it.”

Vieira de Mello telephoned his mother to ensure she did not read about his latest assignment in the Brazilian press. When she got the news, she was devastated. “Sergio, stop taking care of the world, and start taking care of yourself,” she said. She had always worried about her son’s physical security. “What if they mistake you for an American?” she asked. ⁴⁸ He assured her that they would not and promised that he would fly straight to Rio at the end of his four-month appointment. She wrote his name on a piece of paper and placed it inside a Bible. ⁴⁹

On Saturday, after stopping into the UN for a few hours of briefings, he met up with Larriera and toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus. The couple paid particular attention to the architecture, sculpture, jewelry, carvings, and tablets from Iraq. They then went shopping at the Gap for light cotton shirts and khaki slacks.

In the end, Vieira de Mello went to Iraq not primarily because he was auditioning for the position of secretary-general or because he needed an adrenaline hit. He went to Iraq for a far more prosaic reason:The secretary-general of the United Nations had asked him. “People forget this about Sergio,” Prentice says. “For a man who had huge vanity, he respected the UN structure. He was remarkably quaint.”

On Tuesday, May 27, Vieira de Mello attended a meeting of the Iraq Steering Group, Annan’s brain trust on Iraq. He continued to scrutinize Resolution 1483, pleading with his colleagues for clarification. Since they had been in New York during the three-week drafting process, they could better gauge the Council’s “original intent.” “Can anyone explain this to me?” he asked. Edward Mortimer, Annan’s director of communications, recalls, "Each time they tried to explain, I thought to myself, ‘If he wasn’t confused before, he certainly will be now.’”

Events were moving so quickly that Vieira de Mello had to absorb an enormous amount of new information overnight. He had read about the Coalition’s decision to demobilize the Iraqi army, but at the Steering Group meeting he began hearing about the violent consequences of the U.S. edict. Ramiro Lopes da Silva, a fifty-two-year-old Portuguese official who had been the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq before the war, had returned to Baghdad with a small team in early May to resume operations and await word of the UN’s forthcoming role. On speakerphone he reported that the UN had offered humanitarian assistance to Iraqi soldiers, who were no longer being paid. Louise Fréchette, the deputy secretary-general and chair of the Steering Group, argued that payments to the army were the responsibility of the United States, and the UN should not divert aid from elsewhere in the world to bail out the Americans. In the end UN officials decided the soldiers should be eligible for aid like other Iraqis.

UN staff members were split about Annan’s decision to appoint Vieira de Mello. Many were upset that so soon after being steamrollered by the Coalition, the secretary-general would scamper to service U.S. needs by sending his best. They were also disturbed that Vieira de Mello was “America’s pick” and speculated that this was little more than a brown-nosing dress rehearsal for his secretary-generalship. “Sergio has been contaminated by the fact that the Americans consecrated him,” Prendergast argued to the secretary-general. Others reacted differently. “We were flattered that Bush wanted him,” recalls Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman. “Sergio was one of us. And he wasn’t a turncoat. He stood for what we stood for.”

The human rights community was not at all split. They immediately voiced their displeasure. Michael Posner, the executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, lamented Annan’s choice. “It suggests that the human rights job is a part-time job that can be done from Baghdad,” he said. “That’s not the signal we want to be sending.” ⁵⁰ Like almost everyone who knew Vieira de Mello, human rights advocates were sure that he would stay well beyond four months. The human rights groups jointly approached Annan with a list of possible replacement high commissioners. Vieira de Mello was stung. He felt they had never fully trusted him and were using his Iraq assignment as an excuse to nudge him out.

After Annan publicly announced his appointment on May 27, Vieira de Mello received dozens of e-mails from friends and colleagues around the world. He would later write to a colleague that “I was never entirely convinced if it was congratulations or commiserations I should have been offered.” ⁵¹ Perhaps none of the e-mails was as stark as that from Mari Alkatiri, the prime minister of East Timor, who recalls writing a two-line note that read: “Sergio, be careful. Iraq is not East Timor.” Secretary of State Powell telephoned and told him that the resolution’s vagueness offered him an opportunity to give the UN a strong role in Iraq. When Vieira de Mello said that he had every intention of seizing upon the ambiguity, Powell laughed and said, “Well, if you go too far, we’ll let you know.” ⁵²

On May 29, the UN’s new Iraq envoy sent out a group e-mail to thirteen close friends who had written to him. He thanked them in five languages for their notes and wrote that he was going to Iraq “with mixed feelings.” On the one hand he wanted to do what was “best for the UN.” But on the other he was “conscious of the many pitfalls, of my own ignorance and of the Security Council’s mandate ambiguities” and “sad that my personal life again comes last, yet energized and inspired by Carolina.” ⁵³

Even if he was conflicted about going to Iraq himself, he was pleased that the UN had been summoned. The deployment of the UN mission was proof of America’s dependence on the organization. He told a Wall Street Journal reporter: “After cursing the UN or calling it irrelevant or comparing it to the League of Nations and stating loud and clear that the United States would pay no attention to the Security Council in the future if it didn’t support the United States in its war against Saddam Hussein, the United States very quickly came back, even though they will never admit it, in search for international legitimacy, realizing that they can’t really act on their own too long.” ⁵⁴ He continued: “I don’t have a crystal ball, but my guess is that the U.S. and the UK will realize that this is too big, that building a democratic Iraq is not simple . . . and as a result they have every interest in encouraging others who are seen to be more impartial, independent, more palatable to join in and help create these new institutions. . . . We will then look back at the war as an interlude that will have lasted two or three months, that was indeed shocking and did shake us a great deal, but nothing more than that: an accident rather than a new pattern . . . and I touch wood when I say that.” ⁵⁵

A VITAL ROLE?

AMERICAN RULE

RETURN TO THE UN

“SERGIO WILL FIX IT”