The investigators who eventually dove into our exclusive little world to try to figure out how billions of dollars could have vanished from right under our noses when the whole point of our operation was to watch over this money were deeply baffled by the UN system’s inability to enforce even minimal standards of accountability on its members, staff, and agencies.
I tried to explain to them that expecting accountability from the UN system was akin to expecting a blind dog to catch a flying Frisbee.
By design, the UN Security Council is accountable only to itself. There is no proper separation among governing branches on the international stage. All power is concentrated among the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council. If they were to be penalized for their failures, they would have to agree to inflict such punishment as they deem appropriate on themselves.
Alternatively, they can blame the UN Secretariat. As its name indicates, the Secretariat was originally designed to provide conference-support services to its member states, not to manage large and complex multibillion-dollar operations that dwarf its own yearly budget. Of all the operations ever assigned to the UN, ours was the most unusual, grandiose, and unrealistic. But the logic behind asking the Secretariat to manage any new operation is always the same: the great powers don’t trust one another. With the UN in charge, they know that they can all maintain control over key managerial decisions. This, in turn, guarantees a high level of inefficiency.
The more the Security Council micromanages, the easier it is for the UN Secretariat to redirect any and all blame right back at that institution’s doorstep. It’s a simple system, really. The buck can go back and forth between the bodies that share responsibility for a given action and never stop on any one player’s desk. That is, if they know how to play by the rules.
The gap that had developed between the UN’s high-minded principles and the organization’s management culture was a canyon better explored by corporate anthropologists than by law enforcement officials. The investigators would eventually understand this. They came in intending to conduct their probe “by the book,” only to realize there really wasn’t any book to go by. Theirs was the first large-scale exercise in accountability on the world stage. And the rules that regimented our world could not be found in textbooks.
More often than not, new recruits would encounter these rules in much the same manner as one’s forehead encounters a low ceiling. Here are some of the unspoken rules of the game that I banged my head against during my first few months:
One rule that had become clear to me after my numerous blunders in Iraq was that telling the truth as I saw it was not (insofar as Pasha and other managers were concerned) my job. Initially, I was forgiven on account of my youth and inexperience. But as I accumulated new responsibilities at a rate that most bureaucrats would consider unwise, I could no longer claim innocence. With greater responsibility came less freedom of speech.
Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), a British author and diplomat, once wrote, “An Ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” The endurance of this often-quoted phrase speaks to its resonance. Few experienced diplomats ever challenge the notion that their pursuit of “the greater good” somehow absolves them from having to abide by the Ninth Commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness”).
In intelligence circles, this absolution is balanced by what operatives call the Eleventh Commandment: “Don’t Get Caught!” Of course, this is an easier rule to follow when one is operating outside the public realm.
Diplomats are occasionally expected to perform before the cameras. Instead of a script they have a policy, which they must defend regardless of its merits or risk incurring the wrath of their government. Hence, when promoting a senseless or immoral policy, a diplomat is better off being caught in a lie than being caught admitting the truth.
I can’t say I had a moral problem complying with this rule, especially if it was going to help me become “a player.” I just had one question: if it was considered acceptable for a diplomat to lie on behalf of his country, on whose behalf were we, the UN’s diplomats, supposed to lie? After all, our allegiance was not supposed to be to any state in particular, not even to the one that issued our passports. To make this extra clear, the UN issued us its own blue passports for use during professional travel.
Was I supposed to lie on behalf of Pasha or Kofi Annan? Or was I supposed to lie on behalf of the Security Council, which was itself composed of ambassadors who were lying to each other?
Some questions were obviously better left unasked. During the process of compiling our first report to the Security Council, I began to understand what kinds of lies were expected of us. In short, our job was to pretend that there was unity of purpose among the members of the Security Council, the UN Secretariat, and Iraq.
The truth, of course, was that no such unity of purpose existed. Competing interests were at work, and everyone involved understood this. But it was felt that the pretense of consensus was a necessary part of keeping the peace. Hence, our job was to pretend that the policies derived from the lowest denominator of common interest among the states in the Security Council were inherently legitimate, moral, and practical.
Just like the oil companies will commission advertisements that exalt their efforts on behalf of “the environment,” the Security Council would expect us to report on the humanitarian achievements of a program that, in the big picture, ripped the Iraqi people off. When all expenses were added up, including war reparations (one-third of Iraq’s oil revenue) and the cost of arms inspections, UN financial oversight, surcharges, bribes, and kickbacks (more on those later), the Iraqi people received less than fifty cents in humanitarian supplies for every dollar of oil their country sold.
Our charts would show this quite clearly. Yet our words would extol the program’s humanitarian achievements. If half-truths make for complete lies, this was a lie that Security Council members could agree to preserve. This did not mean they stopped lying to one another about other things.
Diplomats spend quite a bit of time reading between other diplomats’ lies. Official meetings are most tedious in this regard, as each player restates his policies for public consumption. Glimmers of truth are much more likely to emerge during cappuccino breaks, lunches, or, better yet, during diplomatic cocktail parties. That’s where the real work of diplomacy took place. As Adlai E. Stevenson, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN, once put it, “A diplomat’s life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.”
Alcohol is the truth serum, Geritol (a popular multivitamin in Stevenson’s day) is for the hangovers, and protocol, I would say, is there to minimize the risk that people whose job it is to lie to one another all day actually end up offending one another.
Inasmuch as I gained a better understanding of why and how diplomats lie, I was struck by the connection between lying and preserving the peace. In a sense, I was back to square one, dealing with the assumption that diplomats were in fact justified in lying as long as their behavior helped maintain peace.
Could peace really be built on blocks of lies? The inescapable answer was yes. Temporarily.
And so we were excused. Temporarily.
There is no more pitiful sight than a bureaucrat who can’t find a way to step aside when a hot potato comes flying. Sometimes the inevitable happens, however, and a bureaucrat is given an actual task involving a deadline or, worst of all, a decision.
Making a decision is a dangerous endeavor. Any bureaucrat making a decision runs the very real risk of violating one of the UN’s many nonsensical regulations, or offending some country’s political sensitivities, and screwing up his career. As servants of the UN Security Council, we had not one boss but fifteen. Any person wishing to gain access to a high-level post in the future needed to keep these fifteen ambassadors with radically opposed worldviews happy. Consequently, the safest decision for a bureaucrat to make was often no decision at all.
The Secretariat was designed to facilitate diplomacy, not to manage a country’s economy, as we had now been asked to do with the Oil-for-Food program. The challenges we faced were so unusual for us that we were better off ignoring them than dealing with them head-on.
“If you let them sit long enough, most issues go away all on their own,” a high-level UN bureaucrat, who shall remain unnamed, once explained at a cocktail party. The official served in the UN’s Bosnia operation and may stand as a perfect illustration of the famous Peter Principle, which holds that in hierarchical bureaucracies, each worker rises to the level of his own incompetence. While this man was at a high level of responsibility, a massacre happened in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Not surprisingly, the UN took no action, and in one sense, the bureaucrat’s theory proved correct. The issue, which was how the UN would protect the population of the town from Serbian forces, went away. Eight thousand Muslim men of Srebrenica were gunned down at point-blank range by Serbian forces while the UN soldiers stood inactive nearby. They had received no clear instructions from New York. This, despite the fact that the town had been declared a “UN safe haven.”
One Bosnian once put it plainly: “If you see Blue Helmets, it means you’re already fucked.”
Well, this may not always be the case. And Blue Helmets have on occasion saved lives. But in this case, how could the organization allow a designated “UN safe haven” to become the site of such a massacre?
Did anybody at the UN take responsibility? Did anybody resign?
No.
By contrast, the entire Dutch government eventually resigned when a report blamed the Dutch peacekeeping troops for having failed in their duties. Now that’s accountability.
At the UN, no bureaucrat ever considered stepping down in the aftermath of Srebrenica. As a master’s student, I interviewed Gen. Philippe Morillon, who was dispatched to lead the Blue Helmets in Bosnia at the time. The man started crying during our interview. Never had he imagined that he would be asked to lead such a senseless mission as the one that was given to him in the Balkans: to keep a peace that did not exist, with hardly enough authority to keep his own men alive.
Kofi Annan, the head of UN peacekeeping at the time, was poised to become the UN’s next secretary general.
If one wants to climb the ladders of the UN bureaucracy, one is far better off dodging responsibility than accepting it. There are plenty of ways one can rationalize such behavior after the fact as long as one doesn’t get stuck with the buck.
This implies some mastery of the different techniques that allow a bureaucrat to pass along responsibility. Yellow routing stickers are a favorite. If a report comes in to a manager’s inbox warning of an imminent debacle requiring a risky decision? Easy: smack a yellow sticker on the memo and pass it along to a colleague with the note “Please advise on credibility of attached report.” The colleague will hate the manager, of course, because if disaster strikes while the report is in his inbox, he’ll be terribly embarrassed. So he’ll rush onto the web and print out an article corroborating the report and smack a new yellow sticker right on top of it with the words “See attached—would appear to confirm credibility of report.”
What is a manager to do? He could smack a new yellow sticker on it and send it to the Office of Legal Affairs: “Please advise on options for legal action.” To doubly protect himself, he could use his URGENT stamp. But he knows that the use of his URGENT stamp may only get the report back into his own inbox faster. So eventually, he decides to call a meeting.
The point of a meeting is to spread out responsibility for decisions—or, better, to find a reason why no decision can be made at all. The meeting agenda is typically made up of pressing issues nobody wants to take action on individually. By the end of the meeting, the youngest person in the room will be asked to summarize what was said, making damned sure he or she doesn’t assign work to his seniors. It’s a great system. Over time, accountability is diluted to the point where it evaporates completely. In the case of our program, so much vapor would accumulate that it eventually condensed to form what UN leaders would describe as a “dark cloud” hanging over the United Nations. Lucky would be the ones who had taken cover before the storm.
Pasha’s distrust of Denis Halliday stemmed from a simple fear, i.e., that Denis would stab him in the back in order to take his post. His fear about Denis was not as irrational as it might appear to the candid eye. Typically, the greatest threat to a bureaucrat’s authority would often come from his or her immediate subordinates.
In a hierarchical pyramid, there is only so much room at the top.
UN officials do not normally get to appoint their own deputies. Their seniors—in Pasha’s case, Iqbal Riza, Kofi Annan’s chief of staff—handpick them.
Did Iqbal Riza not know that he had chosen two people who hated each other’s guts to helm the UN’s largest humanitarian operation? Of course he did. That was the whole point. Divide and rule.
Having established on the first day of our mission to Iraq that Halliday was indeed “out to get him,” Pasha felt justified in depicting his deputy’s efforts to challenge the UN policy on Iraq as an attempt to stab him in the back. I don’t think that’s how Halliday would have described his maneuver, but perceptions seem to have been more relevant than facts. Would Annan back Pasha or would he undermine him only a few months after having appointed him?
Pasha knew the rules would play in his favor. Halliday had exposed himself with decisions and statements that were far more provocative than his own. Pasha’s reserve would be rewarded. And his would-be competitor would have no other dignified choice but to resign.
Having gotten rid of the most immediate threat to his authority, Pasha turned all his suspicions on my director, Yohannes Mengesha, the friendly Ethiopian man who had recruited me into the UN. The question in Pasha’s mind was not whether Mengesha would undermine him but how and when he would attempt to do so. For an answer, Pasha turned to me. He called me over to his office, which was across the street from our own, and asked me, “So, what are these bozos up to?”
“What bozos?”
“The guys across the street!”
“The Americans?” I asked. The U.S. Embassy lay across the street, too.
Pasha shook his head. “Facking Mengesha and those guys!”
“Oh… well, you know, working.…”
“Yeah, right… working to screw me… facking Mengesha and his vacations!”
There we were again. Back to square one. Pasha would never forgive my director for going on vacation while he was in Baghdad. But soon that wouldn’t matter, for the Machiavellian Riza had another trick up his sleeve. He would appoint Mengesha to work for Pasha’s direct boss, the newly appointed deputy to Kofi Annan, Ms. Louise Fréchette of Canada.
Bureaucratically speaking, it was a beautiful move. Take Pasha’s assistant and place him as the assistant to Pasha’s boss.
Well, there was never any doubt that Pasha’s boss was in fact Kofi Annan. But Annan knew better than to get too involved in the UN’s largest and most controversial operation. The very idea that the secretary general should have a deputy was rather recent. Following several instances of gross UN mismanagement, it had occurred to member states that the secretary general could not possibly attend all the receptions and official functions they had lined up for him and be expected to actually manage the organization.
The deputy would be given responsibility for management, though not the authority to manage. Decisions would remain firmly controlled by Annan’s chief of staff. It made perfect sense, and it reflected the core nature of the UN’s management culture in that it ensured that the person with responsibility had no authority; and vice versa, it protected the people with authority from having to take responsibility.
Just as the Security Council arrogates to itself great authority yet bears no responsibility for its actions, the UN Secretariat is given enormous responsibilities yet minimal authority to act on them.
This phenomenon replicated itself at all levels of the UN bureaucracy and naturally fomented suspicions among top managers that their deputies were undermining them behind their back. The system worked brilliantly to sour relations between deputies and assistants all the way down the ladder. Pasha used Halliday’s deputy in the field, an Afghan who had betrayed his country and served under the Soviets before joining the UN, to undermine his rival. The alliance between the Afghan and Pasha, an Armenian Cypriot, was a logical one. The Afghan feared that his boss would slam him with responsibility for failures he did not have the authority to address. His alliance with Pasha guaranteed his survival in the long term. And survival was exactly what the game was all about.
Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, knew what he was talking about when he shared this ironic piece of wisdom: indeed, “even the paranoid have some real enemies.”
The characters who populated our office certainly acted on this premise. The deputy to my director was a French nobleman of Romanian origin named Gregoire. People in the office told me he was a descendant of the Count of Dracula. Hence his nickname. At first, I thought they were joking. But credible sources eventually assured me that Gregoire did indeed have a distant Transylvanian relative named Dracul. Or something. And then, there was the undeniable fact that Gregoire had fangs. I first saw them at the end of my first week in the office, when I decided to introduce myself to the mysterious man in the large office adjacent to my director’s, who always kept his door closed.
With some apprehension, I knocked on Gregoire’s door. He yelled for me to “come in!” in a tone signaling that he was in the kind of bad mood only French nobles of Transylvanian descent can get themselves into. I stepped in, interrupting a game of cards he was losing to his computer, and caught him in mid-yawn. That was my first glimpse at his overdeveloped incisors.
“Oui?” he said, when he was done yawning. I explained that I had come to introduce myself, when in fact my real agenda was to find out what the hell he was doing all day long behind his closed door.
Gregoire explained that he was quote-unquote deputy director, then grimaced, as if to undermine the statement he had just made, and let silence fill the air. He did not appear eager to chat, even after I nearly split my face smiling, so I decided to ask him straight up what he did when he wasn’t playing cards against his PC.
That got his attention. After a moment’s hesitation, he smiled and explained that he didn’t really do anything at all because “the fellow next door” (my director) didn’t give him a chance.
“Aha,” I said, flabbergasted at the level of childishness I would have to deal with in this office. I had never worked in a place where someone of relatively high rank would simply admit to doing nothing all day.
For a moment, I tried to figure out if this meant that Dracula and I would have to be enemies. But I couldn’t really figure it out. So I asked him what he felt should be the nature of our relationship.
The frankness of my question softened him up. After doing a double take to reevaluate me, he told me that I could always come to him if I had any questions. He was, in fact, eager for information himself, because he wasn’t necessarily copied on all the correspondence addressed to my director. I promised him that I would send copies his way and seek his advice, and we left on surprisingly good terms. Dracula, it turned out, could be a very warm character once you got on his good side.
Soon after I met him, Dracula suddenly became my direct boss. Mengesha, my first director, accepted the offer to work for Annan’s deputy (Pasha’s boss). The moment Mengesha packed his things and moved to the thirty-eighth floor, Dracula became the official “officer-in-charge” of the program’s Management Division. This meant he had to stop playing cards and start signing faxes, which were mine to draft and submit for his consideration. Much to my surprise, Dracula, whose experience had been in emergency field operations, was eager to do some actual work.
Unfortunately, Pasha had never envisaged that Dracula would become an actual decision-maker. When Pasha intercepted the first fax going from Dracula to Halliday in Baghdad, he officially barred anybody but himself from any official communication with our mission in the field. All faxes going from New York to Baghdad would have to be signed by Pasha personally. This struck me, and everyone else, as incredibly impractical.
Pasha’s new “policy” meant I had to run across the street to get his signature every time we needed to send a fax. I ended up having two offices. One on Pasha’s side of the street and one on Dracula’s. (Eventually our office would take up space in four separate buildings around the United Nations.)
I suppose we could have saved a lot of time simply by using e-mails. But e-mails had yet to gain acceptance as a “formal” method of communication. They did not constitute an “official” exchange and could therefore be ignored by the recipient if he did not feel like dealing with it.
“Our side of the street” was infuriated by the new procedure, and at a meeting Dracula convened, my colleagues decided to appoint me as their emissary to go and persuade Pasha to grant us the authority to send faxes to Baghdad without his clearance. So off I went across the street in the hope of striking an arrangement with Cindy Spikes, Pasha’s special assistant.
Cindy was in her early forties. She had flamboyant TV hair, shiny white teeth, and a reputation as a man-eater. She invited me to sit in her office with a wave of the hand while she continued her phone conversation.
After she hung up, a radiant smile lit up her face, right on cue. It was fake, but still, it had an unapologetic quality that made it convincing at the same time. Clearly, this was a woman in control of her facial expressions. After listening to my argument about the need to let “our side of the street” send faxes to Baghdad, she immediately understood the problem. A mutiny had developed that needed to be crushed, its leader (whom she assumed to be Dracula) castrated.
To emphasize her point, she made an imaginary scissors motion with two fingers, complete with sound effects: “chuck, chuck, chuck!” As my eyes widened, she clarified that such attitudes needed to be nipped in the bud and asked if there was anything else she could help me with.
I tried to speak, but instead I cracked up. Cindy’s face immediately became severe. She didn’t appreciate being laughed at in her office. Unfortunately, I found it very hard to stop. Her scissors motion had caught me completely off guard. For a moment, it looked like I would get off on the wrong foot with Cindy. I scrambled to think of a reason for my sudden outburst; thankfully, I found one right in front of me.
On Cindy’s desk was a small glass jar filled with garlic and labeled “Boutros Boutros Garlic.”
“Sorry… I just saw this,” I said, pointing to the small garlic joke-jar. “Where did you find this thing?” I asked, still snorting. Cindy looked at me strangely. The label on the garlic jar was meant to make people smile, not burst into uncontrollable laughter.
Having narrowly avoided causing great offense to Pasha’s “spec ass” (as special assistants are sometimes called behind their backs), I decided to stay off the subject of my visit and make light conversation. I learned that Cindy hated men who “didn’t have any balls.” In her opinion, this phenomenon applied to most of the males at the United Nations.
Finding an accommodation with Cindy would clearly not be easy, but it would definitely be required if we were going to get both sides of the street to work together rather than against each other. And I did have a few cards in my hands. Since the management arm of the office was on the other side of the street, she saw me as someone who could serve as her eyes and ears there. (The assistant of your enemy is your friend.) I had no intention of playing that role, but I did make it clear that I was tuned in to what was going on in the office. The other thing that I could leverage was that she had never set foot in Iraq and had a limited understanding of the situation on the ground.
So after a bit of polite conversation, I decided to lead a second charge. I whipped out two of the many faxes I had brought with me to get signed by Pasha. One of the faxes was a recommendation to engage the government of Iraq in a discussion of “vulnerable groups,” meaning kids without parents and widowed mothers, whom we wished to target with special protein biscuits as a way of improving their health and preventing disease. The government had previously refused to engage in any talks about “vulnerable groups,” because it feared that we were interested in helping those it oppressed most severely, like the Shiite Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. Given the subject’s political sensitivity, I explained that I would never let a fax like that go out unless Pasha had signed it.
“I should certainly hope not,” Cindy said.
Hoping to have reassured her, I then pointed to the other fax, which was filled with detailed questions about water pumping stations in Ninewah—
“Ninewhat?”
“Ninewah, it’s a province of Iraq.”
“Right.…”
The fax thanked our staff in the field for their report and asked them for tons of additional technical information. You had to be a water engineer just to understand the questions. I handed the fax to her and watched her eyes crease as she tried to decipher what it was all about.
“Tell you what, kiddo,” she said, “you can send the routine stuff on your side, but it’s your ass if there’s a fuckup, you hear me? So you better vet it before it goes out or I’ll have your head on a stick.”
I stood up but stayed in place. Insofar as I could figure this woman out, it was pretty obvious to me that she would not respect anybody who cowered to such threats. So I ventured into the unknown.
“If you want me to send a truckload of faxes like this your way every day, I’ll do it. It’s your call. Either you trust me to help you or you don’t,” I said.
“All right, young man, don’t take this tone with me,” she said. “And sit your ass back down. We’re not done.”
I sensed she was about to back off her threat, so I sat halfway down on the chair’s armrest.
“Look Mikey,” she said, using a new nickname for me and suddenly transforming herself into a charming person again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but we need to have control over these guys. They’re totally out of control!” I nodded, not because I agreed with her but because I was beginning to understand the world she lived in. It was a world of out-of-control, spineless cowards who were out to undermine her authority. The logic of triangulation would have made her an automatic enemy of Gregoire, and this made me an automatic ally of hers, so her appeal to me was pretty straightforward: “Join me and we shall rule the Oil-for-Food ship together!”
At that point, Pasha walked by in an unusually good mood after a long and probably well-lubricated lunch.
“How are you, Kid?” he said, slapping his hand down on my neck, then feigning to punch me in the stomach.
“Fine, sir…”
Pasha turned to Cindy and launched into an imitation of me with a big stupid smile on my face. As usual, Pasha’s imitation was great, and I made a mental note not to smile so much all the time.
Pasha then pointed to his signature book, which was fat with faxes, and asked, “What’s all this shit?”
“For your signature, sir,” I replied.
“Ahrf! Gimme a break!” he said, fleeing the scene unapologetically to take his customary after-lunch siesta.
“Ahrf! Gimme a break!” I repeated, imitating the under secretary general right back at him. Pasha stopped dead in his tracks. Cindy broke the tension first, chuckling, and then Pasha’s secretary joined in. Pasha wagged his finger at me and said something about the “facking people across the street” having a bad influence on me. Then he disappeared into his office and closed the door. I turned to Cindy and cringed, realizing I had probably gone too far.
Cindy shook her head and laughed some more. “Ah, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, what are we going to do with you?”
I sat all the way back down and began the first of many productive meetings with Cindy. She was a very competent woman when she wasn’t beset with Paper Flow Paranoia (PFP).
Paper Flow Paranoia is a disease that is proper to large bureaucracies and is especially rampant at the United Nations. A most dramatic form of PFP occurs in individuals who become convinced that every detail of a paper communication is designed with the intent of harming them. The way it works is this: when two people at the United Nations communicate, they have to do so “on paper,” because if they merely talk, there’s no record of their communication, and if there’s no record of their communication, it is as if they had never communicated. For example, if Person A asks Person B to do something and Person B agrees to do it but then doesn’t do it, there’s nothing Person A can do about it because there’s no paper trail, and therefore no accountability.
Sometimes, people are so concerned about getting things on paper that, after a phone conversation with a colleague, they will sit down for an hour and write a “note to the file” about their conversation. The note can be copied to actual human beings, but it took me a while to come around to the notion that one might want to address a note to a file. The idea is to have a record, and the only use one can possibly have for such a record is either to protect oneself or attack another.
Paper Flow Paranoia can be sparked by something as seemingly irrelevant as the order in which staff are copied on a given memo. In the days before personal computers, typewriters were used and copies were made on carbon paper—hence the denomination “cc” for carbon copies. The order in which people’s names are listed in any given memo is enormously important and must reflect the hierarchy of the UN. The most important people go first. Only when people are equally important does the alphabetical order kick in, and then it is required. So basically, people at the United Nations know more or less where they stand in the pecking order based on the location of their name on the cc list of a given memo. Even in the UN phone directory, offices were not listed in alphabetical order but in order of (perceived) importance, which made it rather difficult to look up any given division.
The formality of the communication system made it possible for two bureaucrats who did not feel like talking to each other to communicate exclusively through cc’s on memos to their boss. In the organization dedicated to world peace, bureaucrats could sit in adjacent offices, separated only by a thin partition wall that allowed each of them to overhear parts of the other’s phone conversations, and hate each other’s guts as a result of perceived insults contained in memos. In one case, a memo sent by one staff member in 1997 still had another employee royally miffed in 2008. Eleven years had gone by. The issue at stake had lost its relevance ten years ago. For the record, it had to do with food distribution in Iraq.
Memorandums, like bombs, have guidance systems. There are smart memos and dumb memos. A smart memo has a defined target and can navigate its way through the system without causing too much collateral damage. A dumb memo may cause more damage to the sender than to the recipient. Much depends on a bureaucrat’s ability to control his or her anger.
“Even in a declaration of war, one observes the rules of politeness.”
OTTO VON BISMARCK
One reason interpersonal conflicts at the UN often drag on for years, even decades, is that they are conducted so freaking politely. There are showdowns, of course, but they are rarely conclusive in an absolute sense. Both parties will likely stay at the UN for the rest of their lives. If the UN were to have its own reality show, it would be just like Survivor, except nobody would ever get kicked off the island. The show would go on with the same characters even after they conspired to vote one another off the show. It could be called No Exit, like the play by Jean-Paul Sartre in which characters who are locked in a room together slowly realize that they are, in fact, in hell and that their punishment is to be stuck together so they can get on one another’s nerves forever.
To stay sane, a bureaucrat has to win the occasional showdown. And the yardstick against which performances are judged is simple. In the absence of actual stakes, the bureaucrat who has the last polite word wins.
I once witnessed a scene between two UN staff members that provides an extreme illustration of this point. One rainy morning, I was waiting for an elevator with an Afghan and a Yemenite—both of whom were in their midforties. I was aware that the two characters were avowed enemies, though I did not know exactly why. When the elevator arrived, I stepped in, while the Afghan and the Yemenite stood outside, tensely inviting each other to step in first. Taking turns, they waved the palms of their hands, smiled hypocritically, and said, “Please, I insist,” “No, please, I insist,” until finally, the doors started closing without consulting either of them.
Going the extra mile for politeness, the Afghan tried to hold the door from closing so as to let the Yemenite in first. But the Yemenite retaliated by grabbing on to his own side of the door. I think it must have been impossible for them not to be struck by the absurdity of the situation, but they were now locked in a war of wills. Eventually, the elevator itself went berserk, making a loud buzzing noise and forcing its doors shut. Seized with panic, the Afghan and the Yemenite were both forced to jump in at the same time. The Afghan knocked his head on the door and spilled some coffee on the Yemenite’s suit. I immediately asked the Afghan, who had received a substantive blow to the head, if he was OK, but when he saw that I had a smile on my face, he chose not to reply.
“You could at least apologize!” said the Yemenite, tending to the coffee stain on his pants.
“Are you suggesting I did this on purpose?” the Afghan retorted, irritated. Then he caught himself. “If so, please accept my most sincere apologies.”
The Afghan was mocking his counterpart, of course, but he had the last polite word. Would the Yemenite be composed enough to retaliate? Not this time. Any word coming out of his mouth would have been a swear word. So he made a serpentlike hissing noise. The Afghan raised his eyebrows and exchanged a smile with the rest of the passengers, savoring his well-earned victory.
I can testify to dozens of tense situations resulting from diplomats having to walk through open doors. What took me some time to understand was why it was so important for them to let the other person go first. Is this not a courtesy normally extended by men to women? Why would two men, or two women, for that matter, be so insistent on having their counterpart take the first step through an open door?
In a world where there is no truth but consensus, where initiative is highly risky, where assistants can turn into enemies, and where paranoia makes practical sense, I suppose it is unfair to blame diplomats for accepting invitations that leave their backs exposed.