ERBIL, NORTHERN IRAQ, JUNE 2007
I was back at The Edge, the bar I had discovered during my first visit to northern Iraq. The place still deserved its name, and once again it adequately reflected the state I was in when I arrived.
I had traveled back to Iraq as a journalist, contributing articles to the International Herald Tribune and my old college-town paper, the Providence Journal. I was also gathering footage for a documentary on the UN Oil-for-Food experience, to be produced by Denis Poncet, an Academy Award–winning filmmaker who had taken an interest in our most unusual experience.
I was traveling with my friend Amir, a Persian-American doctor of history and psychiatry. Together, we had visited refugee camps, hospitals, and even a mental ward, where every patient had a shaved head and was dressed in a sweat suit. In our group photo with them, Amir and I looked like the coaches of a rather unlikely soccer team. The mental institutions had strange names, which made one worry about the type of people who got locked up in there. One place was called the center for the “deaf and dumb.” Apparently, that was a widely used expression across the world before the advent of sign language.
In Iraqi sign language, I learned, the gesture for “American” involved making a gun with one’s fingers and imitating the act of shooting. This came from old cowboy movies, but one could clearly understand why it was still in use.
Though the Americans were disliked in many parts of Iraq, they were extremely popular with the Kurds up north. People here liked foreigners in general, and we were warmly welcomed regardless of where we showed up. During an early visit to a hospital, we met a group of friendly young Iraqi psychiatrists, who took us under their wing and helped us travel long distances without resorting to following military convoys or hiring protection.
The Edge was located in the Christian neighborhood of Erbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Protected by cement walls, the enclave housed the only non-hotel bar in the city. It looked smaller than I remembered it. And the population that packed the room was very different as well. Standing at the bar were a group of rugged-looking white men, whom we recognized as “Blackwater types,” meaning security contractors. The dance floor looked completely out of place. A group of young Filipina girls were dancing provocatively under the ogling eyes of the sex-deprived men getting drunk at the bar.
There was something of a Wild West saloon feel to the place. So I decided to order a whiskey. We sorely needed a drink. We had spent the afternoon visiting hospitals, assessing the needs of the region’s health facilities. These were far better equipped than the ones I had visited during my first trip. They also benefited from an influx of Sunni Arab doctors who had been forced to flee the chaos in the south of Iraq, where the Health Ministry and the main hospitals had come under control of the Shiite militias and were often no longer safe for Sunnis. Arab Iraqis with friends in the Kurdish north could buy their way to relative safety in that region.
Unfortunately, the hospitals were also very busy operating on men who had been wounded in fighting around Mosul and Kirkuk, two cities right to the south of the Kurdish mountain range, which still harbored significant terrorist networks and remained a powder keg of ethnic rivalry between Arabs and Kurds. I was not used to seeing so much blood and so many wounded patients.
Based on my expression as we left the busy hospital, Amir recommended we go get a drink. The change of scenery was welcome. As we entered the bar we were surprised at the sight of the dancing Filipina girls. In a land where many women wore veils (though far less so in the north than in southern parts of the country), the sudden appearance of skimpily clad women shaking their booties to hip-hop music was rather bewildering. What in the world were they doing here?
As I sipped my drink, one of the girls came up to me. “What hotel are you staying at?” she soon asked.
It didn’t take me long to figure out she was a hooker. In fact, she even introduced me to her pimp, a middle-aged English bloke with white hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a Manchester United soccer jersey, a black leather vest, and a fat gold chain around his neck. Though there was a sign at the entrance of the bar asking people to leave their weapons outside (these signs were as common as nonsmoking signs might be in New York), I noticed this rule did not seem to apply to the pimp.
Instead of asking him how much he charged for the Filipina girl, I asked him if he had friends in the security business who could fly us to Baghdad. We had flown directly into northern Iraq with a company called Zozik Airlines. It wasn’t British Airways, but the plane was in good shape and tickets were relatively affordable. The flight was packed with Kurdish emigrants and their children, who now lived in Europe and were going back to their homeland to visit their families. Most of them clapped, and many had tears in their eyes upon landing in Sulaymaniyah. They were greeted with glee at the airport, and the joy of these reunions almost made us forget that we had landed mighty close to an active war zone.
The drive down to Baghdad was a dangerous one. Security contractors charged exorbitant prices for protection. We had met a group of South Africans a few nights ago. After we bought them more drinks than I could recount, they were ready to cut us a deal.
When I asked them how they had managed to stay alive on Iraq’s dangerous roads, their answer was simple: “We shoot first, and never stop to ask questions.”
Countless Iraqis had been harmed by trigger-happy security contractors. In September, a Blackwater convoy would come under criticism for killing seventeen civilians in one fell swoop, at a traffic junction in Baghdad. The Iraqi government sought to expel the company from the country, but it turned out many of its own officials, as well as the State Department, benefited from these mercenaries’ protection.
In the case of the South African guns for hire, we decided to drop any plans to ride with them after one of their crew revealed himself to be a bitter racist. He was a veteran of South Africa’s war in Rhodesia, and when he talked about that experience, it soon became clear to Amir and me that we were dealing with a war criminal.
Another event dissuaded us from driving to Baghdad from the north altogether. One night, as we came back to our hotel, we found that the front door was locked. There were no staff at the front desk, and we were effectively locked out for the night. After sleeping on the couches of a nearby hotel, we returned the next morning to complain to the hotel owner. The owner apologized before explaining the tragedy that had befallen his staff the previous night. Two of his employees had traveled down to visit their families further south. On their way back, they had been captured by terrorists and tortured for three hours. One of them, a Kurd, was killed. The other one, an Arab, was released after his family paid a ransom.
“This is your ‘new Iraq,’” said the hotel owner. He was an Arab who had fled the violence in Baghdad, leaving behind his home and all his possessions, to take refuge in the Kurdish north. He was one of the lucky ones. More than two million Iraqi refugees had lost everything they owned. Iraqi women were forced to work as prostitutes in Syria and Jordan. Entire families were confined to refugee camps, with scant hope of ever finding their way back home. Terrorism and ethnic or religious violence had ravaged the country in the four years since the U.S. invasion. Nobody knew how long this senseless violence would go on.
After spending an hour with me, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes as he reminisced about the events that had brought him into exile in his own country, the hotel owner slapped his knees with both hands. He needed to get back to work. In a country where even funeral processions had become targets, mourning had become a privilege few people could afford.
The British pimp at The Edge advised us to forget about catching a ride to Baghdad. Just getting a lift with a secure convoy from the airport into the Green Zone would cost us $600 each. Clearly, most of Iraq had become impenetrable to all but men who were prepared to shoot their way through. Neither Amir nor I was interested in taking more risks than necessary to do our job. We scratched our plan to visit Baghdad on the spot and ordered another drink.
One of the girls tried once again to lure me onto the dance floor. The thought of how many contractors she must have been with was enough to make me cling to the bar.
After my second shot of whiskey, I suddenly started to feel nostalgic. The eclectic and diverse humanitarian community that used to call this place home had all but vanished from Iraq. I remembered how Pasha had launched into a wild Greek dance extravaganza on the same dance floor.
Ah, Pasha.… People still remembered him in these parts. Many Kurds had developed an intense dislike for him, and I was wise enough not to introduce myself to local politicians as a former Oil-for-Food employee. During one visit to a TV station, where I got to look through old video footage of Pasha cutting ribbons and visiting local dignitaries, one producer told me that Pasha would probably not be safe if he ever came back to the region.
“Rest assured, he has no such plans,” I said.
Since his demise at the hands of the Volcker Committee, Pasha had been forced to flee New York, where he no longer enjoyed diplomatic immunity. He had settled into retirement in his native Cyprus, where the local government had pledged not to extradite him for trial in the United States. On January 16, 2007, the Southern District Court of Manhattan had indicted him on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In March 2006, Claudia Rosett, the freelance reporter who had broken most of the scoops in the Oil-for-Food affair, showed up at Pasha’s doorstep in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia. In the short time it took him to open the door and shut it back in her face, Pasha said, “I am not running away!” Then he added, “I am not ashamed to look into the mirror when I shave.”
Pasha being Pasha, he eventually invited Rosett in for coffee. As a rule, he liked to “keep his enemies close,” even if this meant having coffee with someone who had hounded him for the past couple of years and played a significant role in causing his downfall.
In his last letter to the staff, Pasha had argued that he had been made a scapegoat. While he was found guilty of corruption by Volcker, there was something to be said for the fact that he was far from the only one involved who had profited at the expense of Iraq’s civilians. In a sense, Volcker’s investigation reminded me of Hercule Poirot’s inquiry in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
This was a whodunit in which most parties involved had “done it.” A truly “multilateral” heist. The entire international community had been involved in the fleecing of Iraq.
At the end of Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot assembled the passengers in the train’s main dining room to present them with the results of his investigation. Poirot had two theories about how the murder went down, and he asked the assembly to decide which one was correct. His first theory was that a single individual, who had since escaped, was guilty of the crime. It was a perfectly plausible theory, of course, but not one that could answer all his questions. And thus Poirot exposed his second theory: namely, that every passenger in the compartment had participated in the crime. Poirot was not surprised to see the assembly enthusiastically endorse his first theory.
Volcker approached his task in much the same manner as Poirot. The Security Council was perfectly content with his first line of inquiry into the petty corruption of a retired UN bureaucrat who had since escaped to Cyprus. But when he started to dig deeper, revealing how systematically the member states of the Security Council had participated in the fraud by violating their own laws, his investigation began to run out of cash.
Council members weren’t about to pay Volcker to cause them further embarrassment. Even the U.S. government stonewalled some of his requests, especially after he started calling for the investigation of the staggering levels of corruption that had followed the war itself.
While some people were outraged that Pasha had managed to escape the law, personally I could not help but feel relieved to know that the man who had taken me under his wing when I was an absolute beginner in the world of international diplomacy would be spared the prospect of spending his retirement years in jail.
Had I connected the dots earlier and talked to the authorities about Pasha’s efforts to introduce his “friend” the oil trader to the Iraqi government during our lunch at the Baghdad Hunting Club back in 1998, it is possible that the District Attorney’s office might have moved against him much faster and arrested him while he was still in New York. But if Pasha’s guilt could have been proved before a wider investigation got under way, chances are we never would have found out about the true extent of the corruption that plagued our international system.
After one interview, in which I had refused to speculate about Pasha’s guilt, an assistant DA asked me, point-blank, whether I was protecting Pasha out of a sense of loyalty. Was I? I pondered the question as I walked out of the Federal Building in downtown New York. I suppose there was a difference between wishing that Pasha was innocent and hoping for the same. In truth, I had scant reasons on which to base real hope. How could I have missed the obvious signs that Pasha’s behavior toward the Iraqi government had changed dramatically after our fateful lunch with the oil minister? How could I not have concluded that Pasha’s effort to plug his “friend” Abdelnour constituted a gross conflict of interest that would likely land him a cash commission? How could I have been so naïve?
Perhaps I had found it convenient to lie to myself, as so many of us had done, in order to rationalize the cynical realities that permeated our world. The news of Pasha’s guilt had burst the last illusion I maintained about my former employer and cast new light on the meaning of my work in the service of the United Nations.
And yet I could not afford to become cynical about this journey. If anything, I had seen where cynicism led people. Pasha had been corrupted by cynicism long before he had been tempted by greed.
My colleagues and I had paid a steep price for our experience. But it was not without value. The Oil-for-Food debacle had sparked the most meaningful push for reforms since the UN’s creation. And it exposed the true nature of the organization’s core institution: the Security Council itself.
The black elixir that fueled the world economy enticed most members of the Security Council to violate the laws they had adopted together, completely discrediting the institution’s claim to legitimacy and moral authority.
Sad as this discovery was, it would have been far worse if it had never been made. While no amount of reforms would transform the United Nations into a perfectly accountable body, we had witnessed a historic first with the imposition of previously unimaginable demands for transparency on the world body.
If transparency, or glasnost, as Mikhail Gorbachev used to call it, could bring the Soviet empire to its knees, surely it could be trusted to provoke real change in the ossified structures that govern international affairs.
The demise of our operation marked the end of an era. Radical new ideas were emerging about how to reshape the world organization. One former adviser to Kofi Annan, who also resigned, argued for a dissolution of the Security Council and its Secretariat in favor of an agency-driven approach to solving global challenges. In a New York Times op-ed published in September 2005, Nader Mousavizadeh, a fellow Danish national of Persian origin, challenged the forces of the status quo, which had opposed reforms even in the aftermath of the Oil-for-Food debacle. “At this stage,” he wrote, “the burden surely falls on the proponents of the status quo—those who cannot imagine a world without a Security Council, a General Assembly or Secretariat—to explain what value these structures add that outweighs the profound damage they have done to the very idea of multilateral action.”
The forces of complacency were being rattled. People who could hardly be described as right-wing UN bashers or left-wing radicals were starting to make their voices heard.
Instead of rattling my faith in the need for international governance, my experience had strengthened it. As much as I researched the history of UN reform, however, I never found a better blueprint for healthy international organization than that originally offered by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “On Perpetual Peace.” Unfortunately, neither the United Nations nor its predecessor, the League of Nations, sought to abide by Kant’s guidelines, which foresaw an organization of democratic, independent republics that would apply to the international realm the laws and values that the Enlightenment had brought to bear on the domestic realm.
The financial corruption I had witnessed had its roots in the corruption of a great vision, an attempt to apply international laws to governments that considered themselves above their own domestic laws and whose actions had a spillover effect that tainted the entire system.
“Corruption is nature’s way of restoring our faith in Democracy,” wrote Peter Ustinov. The Security Council was indeed coming under mounting criticism for failing to adhere to the basic principles of the democratic process and for concentrating all power in the hands of a few states. The lack of separation between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of governance on the world stage would eventually need to be addressed. A legal body whose members violated their own laws with impunity would not prove sustainable in the long run. Change was inevitable.
Perhaps I was fooling myself once again. But insofar as delusions go, optimistic ones are far healthier than pessimistic ones. The lies we tell ourselves, for better or worse, often end up defining the way we act. Greater transparency was a cause in which I felt comfortable placing my faith. And our debacle, while tragic in many ways, had given this cause momentum. Never before had so many corrupt individuals and companies been exposed on the world stage. Under pressure from NGOs like the Government Accountability Project, UN whistleblowers were offered new protections. A steady progression toward greater transparency was in motion, and, to the best of my ability, I would contribute to this process in the future.
After returning from Iraq, I took up a teaching job at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. In the spring semester of 2008, after one lecture in which I had spoken of my misadventures working for the United Nations, a student came up to me and asked me for advice. She had an opportunity to join the United Nations and was wondering, in light of my experience, whether I thought it was a good idea.
Spooky’s old words of advice came to mind: be your own man.
It had been the best advice I received throughout this whole journey. It ultimately led me into a confrontation with the “system,” and I can’t say that made for only good times. I realized that Pasha had felt betrayed by my decision to call for an investigation. And surely, he realized that I felt equally betrayed by his corruption, too. I suppose our trajectories had been on a collision course from the start.
The system tends to transform young idealists into old realists. Both outlooks have their inherent flaws (idealists can be alarmingly naïve, just as realists can be dangerously cynical), but both offer necessary, even complementary, contributions to the process. In fact, the idealism/realism dichotomy is at the center of most debates in the field of international affairs. In the real world of diplomacy, the clash between these two worldviews often translates into a clash between generations.
Ours was a game in which most players ended up feeling stabbed in the back at some point or another, either on the level of their ideals or on the level of their raw personal interests. The key to surviving in such an environment was to try to be true to oneself. And so, in answer to the young student, I found myself repeating the advice that I had received at the outset of my own journey.
“I can’t advise you against joining the UN,” I said. “In fact, I hope that my own experience doesn’t dissuade you from joining. I do feel I made a difference. And if that’s what you want to do at this stage in your career, nothing should hold you back.”
She nodded.
“But if the going gets tough, as surely it will, just remember: be your own… woman. Your own person. Think for yourself. And if you see something rotten, don’t be afraid to speak out.”
Seeing signs of confusion in her expression, I remembered how confused I had felt myself, some ten years ago, when Spooky first welcomed me to the game. And it made me smile.