Never Forget: Bill Clinton Killed a Million Iraqis

[elfismiles]

While we're talkin mass-casualty-counts from American Emperialism...

Bill Clinton Killed a Million Iraqis – Andrew Cockburn on the Invisible War

Scott Horton Interviews Andrew Cockburn
October 21, 2010

Andrew Cockburn, author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, discusses his review of Joy Gordon’s Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, how innocuous-sounding sanctions fail to engender the popular opposition that a war does even though the death and destruction levels are on par and how the Clinton administration changed the requirements to end sanctions to depose Saddam Hussein and score domestic political points.

MP3 here. (20:19)
http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_10_20_cockburn.mp3

Andrew Cockburn is the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, and co-producer of American Casino, a documentary on the origins and consequences of the financial crash. He is a writer and lecturer on defense and national affairs and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic, among other publications.

http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/10/21/andrew-cockburn-2/

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010
pages 9-10 | 3361 words

Worth It
Andrew Cockburn
Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon
Harvard, 359 pp, £29.95, April 2010, ISBN 978 0 674 03571 3

Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment

to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent improvements, which would be wasted if it came to an end; it was very complicated, and a vast organisation had established a vested interest. The experts reported, therefore, that it was our one instrument for imposing our peace terms on Germany, and that once suspended it could hardly be reimposed.

In the event, the ban on food imports was lifted (for fear of promoting Bolshevism) before Germany accepted the punitive terms of the Versailles treaty, but blockades have retained their popularity as a weapon deployed by strong powers against the weak. In most instances they have been ineffective in achieving their stated purpose, the notable exception being the sanctions reluctantly levied by Western governments in response to popular pressure against the South African apartheid regime. More often they constitute an exercise in vindictiveness, as with the US embargo on Vietnam and Cambodia after the Indochina war, or Israel’s blockade of Gaza with the expressed intention of ‘putting the population on a diet’.

The multiple disasters inflicted on Iraq since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion have tended to overshadow the lethally effective ‘invisible war’ waged against Iraqi civilians between August 1990 and May 2003 with the full authority of the United Nations and the tireless attention of the US and British governments. As an example of carefully crafted callousness this story offers a close parallel to Britain’s German exercise. In both cases, sanctions were retained after their original purpose – the military defeat of the blockaded nation – had been achieved, and in both cases they targeted civilians while leaving their rulers relatively unscathed. Those implementing the blockades argued vehemently that their suspension would mean a reversal of the victory on the battlefield and the defeated power’s return to its bellicose ways.

Even at the time, the sanctions against Iraq drew only sporadic public comment, and even less attention was paid to the bureaucratic manoeuvres in Washington, always with the dutiful assistance of London, which ensured the deaths of half a million children, among other consequences. In her excellent book Joy Gordon charts these in horrifying detail, while providing a rigorous examination of the alibis and excuses given by sanctioneers at the time and since: the suffering was entirely due to Saddam Hussein’s obduracy; supplies of food and medicine were available but withheld by the regime in the interests of propaganda; the Oil For Food programme was corrupt and enabled Saddam to evade the impact of sanctions, and so on.

The legal foundation for the campaign rested on Security Council Resolution 661, passed in August 1990 shortly after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. This prohibited all UN member states from trading with Iraq: the ban crucially included all oil purchases. Leaving nothing to chance, the US proffered douceurs of economic aid prior to the vote to impoverished countries such as Ethiopia and Zaire, which were then serving as temporary members of the Security Council. After voting against the resolution, the Yemeni ambassador to the UN was tersely informed: ‘That will be the most expensive “no” vote you ever cast.’ Three days later the US cancelled its entire aid programme to his country.

Ironically, Iraqi sanctions were popular at first among the liberal-minded because they appeared to offer an alternative to war. As the Bush administration’s determination to go to war became clearer, allowing sanctions ‘time to work’ became a rallying cry for the peace party. After all, economic sanctions had brought the apartheid regime to its knees without bloodshed or noticeable suffering among the population: why not use them against Saddam Hussein? Less well publicised were the severe US sanctions against Cambodia, motivated by little other than spite over the regime’s defeat of the Khmer Rouge with Vietnamese help. Coincidentally, these were being phased out in 1990 after embarrassing revelations of continuing covert American support for the Khmer Rouge.

The war, when it came, was directed as much against Iraq’s economy as against its army in Kuwait. Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal planner, Colonel John Warden of the US air force, explained to me afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Iraq to function as a modern industrial society. The air force had dreamed of being able to do this sort of thing since before the Second World War, and Warden thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’ now made it a practical proposition. Iraq’s electrical power plants, telecommunications centres, oil refineries, sewage plants and other key infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Warden, I recall, was piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Iraqi society.

Astonishingly, much of the damage was repaired within a year of the war’s end following a national campaign billed as ‘the counter-attack’. I had visited al-Dora power station on the edge of Baghdad in July 1991 and found a heap of twisted metal. Seven months later, I found half of the station functioning again. The control room, totally demolished by allied bombs, had been re-created, complete with the pastel colour scheme favoured by its original Italian designers. Looking closely at the control panel dials I could see that the numbers had been painstakingly painted on with a thin brush. If this reconstruction programme had been able to make use of the billions of dollars that had once poured in from oil sales, Iraq could soon have returned to its prewar condition. But the counter-attack was fought with makeshift repairs and cannibalised spare parts. As the blockade persisted, the deterioration of the infrastructure was unremitting.

The first intimation that the blockade would continue even though Iraq had been evicted from Kuwait came in an offhand remark by Bush at a press briefing on 16 April 1991. There would be no normal relations with Iraq, he said, until ‘Saddam Hussein is out of there’: ‘We will continue the economic sanctions.’ Officially, the US was on record as pledging that sanctions would be lifted once Kuwait had been compensated for the damage wrought during six months of occupation and once it was confirmed that Iraq no longer possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the capacity to make them. A special UN inspection organisation, Unscom, was created, headed by the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, a veteran of arms control negotiations. But in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.’

Despite this explicit confirmation that the official justification for sanctions was irrelevant, Saddam’s supposed refusal to turn over his deadly arsenal would be brandished by the sanctioneers whenever the price being paid by Iraqis attracted attention from the outside world. And although Bush and Gates claimed that Saddam, not his weapons, was the real object of the sanctions, I was assured at the time by officials at CIA headquarters in Langley that an overthrow of the dictator by a population rendered desperate by sanctions was ‘the least likely alternative’. The impoverishment of Iraq – not to mention the exclusion of its oil from the global market to the benefit of oil prices – was not a means to an end: it was the end.

Visiting Iraq in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a Third World standard of living. Baghdad auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Mansour, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Saddam). The notion that they would still be in force a decade later was unimaginable.

The doctors should not have had anything to worry about. Resolution 661 prohibited the sale or supply of any goods to Iraq (or to Kuwait while it was under Iraqi control) with the explicit exception of ‘supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs’. However, every single item Iraq sought to import, including food and medicine, had to be approved by the ‘661 Committee’, created for this purpose and staffed by diplomats from the 15 members of the Security Council. The committee met in secret and published scarcely any record of its proceedings. Thanks to the demise of the Soviet Union, the US now dominated the UN, using it to provide a cloak of legitimacy for its unilateral actions.

The 661 Committee’s stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but as Gordon explains, its actual function was to deny the import of even the most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be used in the production of weapons of mass destruction. An ingenious provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which clearance had been requested on hold. So, while other members, even a majority, might wish to speed goods to Iraq, the US and its ever willing British partner could and did block whatever they chose on the flimsiest of excuses. As a means of reducing a formerly prosperous state to a pre-industrial condition and keeping it there, this system would have aroused the envy of the blockade bureaucrats derided by Keynes. Thus in the early 1990s the United States blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes, materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint. In 1991 American representatives forcefully argued against permitting Iraq to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfil a humanitarian need. Later, the diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed ‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Washington, should be denied.

Throughout the period of sanctions, the United States frustrated Iraq’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from the Tigris, which had become an open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine, vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of all this were visible in paediatric wards. Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 1990 to one in eight seven years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.

If the aim of such a comprehensive embargo had indeed been the dictator’s overthrow, its perpetrators might have pondered the fact that it was having the opposite effect. Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait had led to the disaster, was now able to point to the outside powers as the source of Iraqis’ suffering. As most people’s savings and income dwindled away in the face of raging inflation and widespread unemployment, they became ever more dependent on the rations, however meagre, distributed through Saddam’s efficient government apparatus. Because medicine was in short supply and hospitals were deteriorating, Iraqis came to believe that almost any disease might be curable were it not for sanctions. In the countryside, villagers often kept dusty X-rays in case sanctions ended one day and they could find a cure.

Most of the time, those overseeing the blockade were able to go about their task without public reproach. Every so often a press report from Baghdad would highlight the immense slow-motion disaster in Iraq, but for the most part the conscience of the world, and especially that of the American public, remained untroubled. Administration officials reassured themselves that any hardship was entirely the fault of Saddam, and that in any case reports of civilian suffering were deliberately exaggerated by the Iraqi regime. As one US official with a key role in the Unscom weapons inspections said to me in all sincerity at the time: ‘Those people who report all those dying babies are very carefully steered to certain hospitals by the government.’ In spite of reams of child mortality statistics collected by various reputable outside parties, such as the World Health Organisation, it was impossible to convince him otherwise.

Very occasionally, a ray of truth would shine through. In 1996, the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN. Albright maintained that sanctions had proved their value because Saddam had made some admissions about his weapons programmes and had recognised the independence of Kuwait (he did this in 1991, right after the war). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Albright replied: ‘We think the price is worth it.’ Years later, as Gordon observes, Albright was still ‘trying to explain her way out of her failure to respond more effectively to what she described as “our public relations problem”’. Her attempts to justify the policy were echoed by other sanctioneers, such as the State Department official quoted by Gordon who maintained that ‘the US is conducting a public good which it has done a poor job of selling to other countries.’

In the first year of sanctions the UN offered to allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil under strict conditions. Saddam turned this down on the grounds that it infringed on Iraq’s sovereignty, but five years later he accepted an improved offer which allowed Iraq to sell its oil and use the proceeds, under UN supervision, to buy food and some other necessities. Under the terms of the programme, much of the money was immediately siphoned off to settle what critics called Kuwait’s ‘implausibly high’ claims for compensation for damage from the 1990 invasion and to pay for the Unscom inspections and other UN administrative costs in Iraq. Although the arrangement did permit some improvement in living standards, there was no fundamental change: the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reported in November 1997 that despite the programme, 31 per cent of children under five still suffered from malnutrition, supplies of safe water and medicine were ‘grossly inadequate’ and the health infrastructure suffered from ‘exceptionally serious deterioration’.

It was possible for the Iraqis to wring some pecuniary advantage from the Oil for Food programme by extracting kickbacks from the oil traders whom it favoured with allocations, as well as from companies, such as wheat traders, from which it bought supplies. In 2004, as Iraq disintegrated, the ‘Oil for Food scandal’ was ballyhooed in the US press as ‘the largest rip-off in history’. Congress, which had maintained a near total silence during the years of sanctions, now erupted with denunciations of the fallen dictator’s fraud and deception, which, with alleged UN complicity, had supposedly been the direct cause of so many deaths.

Gordon puts all this in context. ‘Under the Oil for Food programme, the Iraqi government skimmed about 10 per cent from import contracts and for a brief time received illicit payments from oil sales. The two combined amounted to about $2 billion … By contrast, in 14 months of occupation, the US-led occupation authority depleted $18 billion in funds’ – money earned from the sale of oil, most of which disappeared with little or no accounting and no discernible return to the Iraqi people. Saddam may have lavished millions on marble palaces (largely jerry-built, as their subsequent US military occupants discovered) but his greed paled in comparison to that of his successors.

The economic strangulation of Iraq was justified on the basis of Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Year after year, UN inspectors combed Iraq in search of evidence that these WMD existed. But after 1991, the first year of inspections, when the infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was detected and destroyed, along with missiles and an extensive arsenal of chemical weapons, nothing more was ever found. Given Saddam’s record of denying the existence of his nuclear project (his chemical arsenal was well known; he had used it extensively in the Iran-Iraq war, with US approval) the inspectors had strong grounds for suspicion, at least until August 1995. That was when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the former overseer of his weapons programmes, suddenly defected to Jordan, where he was debriefed by the CIA, MI6 and Unscom. In those interviews he made it perfectly clear that the entire stock of WMD had been destroyed in 1991, a confession that his interlocutors, including the UN inspectors, took great pains to conceal from the outside world.

Nevertheless, by early 1997 Rolf Ekeus had concluded, as he told me many years later, that he must report to the Security Council that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was therefore in compliance with the Council’s resolutions, barring a few points. He felt bound to recommend that the sanctions should be lifted. Reports of his intentions threw the Clinton administration into a panic. The end of sanctions would lay Clinton open to Republican attacks for letting Saddam off the hook. The problem was solved, Ekeus explained to me, by getting Madeleine Albright, newly installed as secretary of state, to declare in a public address on 26 March 1997 that ‘we do not agree with the nations who argue that, if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.’ The predictable result was that Saddam saw little further point in co-operating with the inspectors. This provoked an escalating series of confrontations between the Unscom team and Iraqi security officials, ending in the expulsion of the inspectors, claims that Saddam was ‘refusing to disarm’, and, ultimately, war.

Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq who resigned in 1998 in protest at what he called the ‘genocidal’ sanctions regime, described at that time its more insidious effects on Iraqi society. An entire generation of young people had grown up in isolation from the outside world. He compared them, ominously, to the orphans of the Russian war in Afghanistan who later formed the Taliban. ‘What should be of concern is the possibility at least of more fundamentalist Islamic thinking developing,’ Halliday warned. ‘It is not well understood as a possible spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take extreme positions.’ This was the society US and British armies confronted in 2003: impoverished, extremist and angry. As they count the losses they have sustained from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the West should think carefully before once again deploying the ‘perfect instrument’ of a blockade.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n14/andrew-cockburn/worth-it

Letters
Vol. 32 No. 16 · 19 August 2010

From Richard Reid

Andrew Cockburn states that half a million Iraqi children died as a result of the UN sanctions of the 1990s (LRB, 22 July). This is far-fetched. I was in Iraq with a Unicef/World Health Organisation social damage survey team six months after sanctions began, during the bombing of February 1991. We had brought a 12-truck convoy of relief supplies across the border from Iran. Everywhere we went – Fallujah, Amara, Baghdad, Baqubah – there was evidence of a massive breakdown in health services and a dangerous decline in child nutrition, always the precursor of immune system collapse and the diseases that kill children. But afterwards, and in later surveys, we found nothing approaching the mortality figures given by Cockburn.

Richard Reid
Istanbul

From Roger Fieldhouse

I was surprised that Andrew Cockburn didn’t include the half-century blockade of Cuba by the United States on his list of ineffective sanctions. It is only now, with the partial easing of the blockade, that US influence in Cuba is beginning to reassert itself. Cockburn is only partly correct in describing the sanctions ‘reluctantly levied’ against the South African apartheid regime as effective. The Anti-Apartheid Movement’s activities, including its demand for economic sanctions, undoubtedly helped to raise awareness of apartheid and keep it on the international political agenda. But it never succeeded in persuading governments to impose economic sanctions against South Africa, although the arms embargo and oil sanctions did cause severe economic problems for the regime. It was South Africa’s calamitous financial crisis in 1985 that was the crucial blow to apartheid. An assessment of the balance between risk and profit turned international capitalism (and the US in particular) against South Africa: loans and investment dried up.

Roger Fieldhouse
Thorverton, Devon

[AlicetheKurious]

[AlicetheKurious]

[Simulist]

Even if a Republican Rapture had happened, and every right-wing, Rush Limbaugh-listening, Ronald Reagan-loving Republican had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth back in 1994, "liberals" like Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Richardson (and much of the rest of the cretinous, sniveling Democratic Party) would have helped ensure that America's march further into fascism would be happening right on schedule.

After all, they're still enabling imperial fascism today! — just more duplicitously than their more openly-fascist colleagues "on the other side."

(As if there really were "another side.")

[elfismiles]

Thanks for those clips AtK ... I'd seen the Albright one but not the Richardson.

[Montag]

Shades of Adolf Eichmann there from Richardson... Just vile stuff. This is the kind of thing that happens, I guess when you play "chess".

[Bruce Dazzling]

Joy Gordon: U.S. responsible for human toll of Iraq sanctions
Posted: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 9:00 am

Last week the U.N. Security Council voted to lift the sanctions that it imposed on Iraq 20 years ago. Vice President Joe Biden hailed the occasion as “an end to the burdensome remnants of the dark era of Saddam Hussein.”

What he did not say was that the sanctions were more than burdensome. They triggered a humanitarian crisis that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and the collapse of every system necessary to sustain human life in a modern society. And he certainly did not mention that among all the nations on the Security Council, it was the U.S. -- and the U.S. alone -- that ensured that this human damage would be massive and indiscriminate.

All of this took place within an obscure committee of the Security Council, known as the 661 Committee. Few have heard of it. But it was this committee that determined whether Iraqis would have clean water, electricity in their homes, or fuel for cars and trucks.

It was a committee that met behind closed doors, and never made its records public. Within it, the U.S. had a unique role. As the humanitarian situation in Iraq deteriorated, support for the sanctions on the Security Council began to erode. When other members of the council sought to allow critical humanitarian goods into Iraq, the U.S. vetoed them. For the first eight months of the sanctions, the U.S. would not even allow Iraq to import food. Once the committee decided to allow food, the U.S. then objected to trucks needed to deliver food and other goods, as well as irrigation equipment to increase agriculture.

The U.S. policies were extreme and relentless. The U.S. blocked refrigeration for medicines, on the grounds that refrigerators might be used to store agents for biological weapons. The U.S. blocked things as innocuous as plywood, fabric, glue and glass on the grounds that they were “inputs to industry,” which might be used to rebuild Iraq’s military.

The U.S. blocked child vaccines and yogurt-making equipment on the grounds that the Iraqi government might use them to make weapons of mass destruction. When Iraq tried to increase the number of small animals for meat, cheese and milk, the U.S. blocked goat and sheep vaccines, claiming that Iraq might use them as biological weapons.

The U.S. prevented Iraq from importing water tankers during a period of drought, while there were epidemic levels of sickness from drinking water unfit for human consumption. And water pipes for irrigation. And light switches, and telephones, and ambulance radios, and fire trucks, claiming that they might be used by Iraq’s military.

At one point, a U.S. official came before the 661 Committee with a vial of cat litter, and informed the members, in all seriousness: “This could be used to stabilize anthrax.”

No one else found the U.S. justifications to be plausible. UNMOVIC, the U.N.’s weapons inspectors, disputed many of the U.S. justifications for blocking humanitarian goods. Even Britain, the U.S.’ closest ally on the Security Council, did not share the views of the U.S. Still, the U.S. rarely relented.

The U.S. insisted that these policies were aimed at Saddam Hussein. But it was obvious that they had little to do with him. Iraq’s political and military leadership, and the wealthy elite, were insulated from the hardship. But the population as a whole was not.

To destroy a country’s infrastructure, to reduce a nation to a pre-industrial condition and then keep it in that state, means precisely that it will be unfit to sustain human life. The reports of U.N. agencies and international organizations such as the Red Cross ensured that U.S. officials knew, with certainty, exactly what harm was being caused by U.S. policies.

While Vice President Biden tells the world that the end of the sanctions means that Iraq can now move forward to a bright future, what he does not say is that in fact there was damage that was irreversible, including child deaths and stunted growth from years of malnutrition. What he also does not say is that the rest of the damage -- the collapse of the infrastructure, the terrible deterioration in industry, agriculture, electricity, health and education -- was not just due to Saddam Hussein’s indifference. However much harm Saddam did to the Iraqi people, the U.S., for over a decade, made it far, far worse.

Joy Gordon, Ph.D., is a philosophy professor at Fairfield University. She is the author of “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions” (Harvard University Press).

[Elvis]

It's all "just business"...

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2004/10/james-bakers-double-life

James Baker's Double Life

By Naomi Klein - October 12th, 2004

When President Bush appointed former Secretary of State James Baker III as his envoy on Iraq's debt on December 5, 2003, he called Baker's job "a noble mission." At the time, there was widespread concern about whether Baker's extensive business dealings in the Middle East would compromise that mission, which is to meet with heads of state and persuade them to forgive the debts owed to them by Iraq. Of particular concern was his relationship with merchant bank and defense contractor the Carlyle Group, where Baker is senior counselor and an equity partner with an estimated $180 million stake.

Until now, there has been no concrete evidence that Baker's loyalties are split, or that his power as Special Presidential Envoy—an unpaid position—has been used to benefit any of his corporate clients or employers. But according to documents obtained by The Nation, that is precisely what has happened. Carlyle has sought to secure an extraordinary $1 billion investment from the Kuwaiti government, with Baker's influence as debt envoy being used as a crucial lever.

The secret deal involves a complex transaction to transfer ownership of as much as $57 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. The debts, now owed to the government of Kuwait, would be assigned to a foundation created and controlled by a consortium in which the key players are the Carlyle Group, the Albright Group (headed by another former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and several other well-connected firms. Under the deal, the government of Kuwait would also give the consortium $2 billion up front to invest in a private equity fund devised by the consortium, with half of it going to Carlyle.

The Nation has obtained a copy of the confidential sixty-five-page "Proposal to Assist the Government of Kuwait in Protecting and Realizing Claims Against Iraq," sent in January from the consortium to Kuwait's foreign ministry, as well as letters back and forth between the two parties. In a letter dated August 6, 2004, the consortium informed Kuwait's foreign ministry that the country's unpaid debts from Iraq "are in imminent jeopardy." World opinion is turning in favor of debt forgiveness, another letter warned, as evidenced by "President Bush's appointment...of former Secretary of State James Baker as his envoy to negotiate Iraqi debt relief." The consortium's proposal spells out the threat: Not only is Kuwait unlikely to see any of its $30 billion from Iraq in sovereign debt, but the $27 billion in war reparations that Iraq owes to Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion "may well be a casualty of this U.S. [debt relief] effort."

In the face of this threat, the consortium offers its services. Its roster of former high-level US and European politicians have "personal rapport with the stakeholders in the anticipated negotiations" and are able to "reach key decision-makers in the United Nations and in key capitals," the proposal states. If Kuwait agrees to transfer the debts to the consortium's foundation, the consortium will use these personal connections to persuade world leaders that Iraq must "maximize" its debt payments to Kuwait, which would be able to collect the money after ten to fifteen years. And the more the consortium gets Iraq to pay during that period, the more Kuwait collects, with the consortium taking a 5 percent commission or more.

The goal of maximizing Iraq's debt payments directly contradicts the US foreign policy aim of drastically reducing Iraq's debt burden. According to Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and a leading expert on government ethics and regulations, this means that Baker is in a "classic conflict of interest. Baker is on two sides of this transaction: He is supposed to be representing the interests of the United States, but he is also a senior counselor at Carlyle, and Carlyle wants to get paid to help Kuwait recover its debts from Iraq." After examining the documents, Clark called them "extraordinary." She said, "Carlyle and the other companies are exploiting Baker's current position to try to land a deal with Kuwait that would undermine the interests of the US government."

The Nation also showed the documents to Jerome Levinson, an international lawyer and expert on political and corporate corruption at American University. He called it "one of the greatest cons of all time. The consortium is saying to the Kuwaiti government, 'Through us, you have the only chance to realize a substantial part of the debt. Why? Because of who we are and who we know.' It's influence peddling of the crassest kind."

In the confidential documents, the consortium appears acutely aware of the sensitivity of Baker's position as Carlyle partner and debt envoy. Immediately after listing the powerful players associated with Carlyle—including former President George H.W. Bush, former British prime minister John Major and Baker himself—the document states: "The extent to which these individuals can play an instrumental role in fashioning strategies is now more limited...due to the recent appointment of Secretary Baker as the President's envoy on international debt, and the need to avoid an apparent conflict of interest." [Emphasis in original.] Yet it goes on to state that this will soon change: "We believe that with Secretary Baker's retirement from his temporary position [as debt envoy], that Carlyle and those leading individuals associated with Carlyle will then once again be free to play a more decisive role..."

Chris Ullman, vice president and spokesperson for Carlyle, said that "neither the Carlyle Group nor James Baker wrote, edited or authorized this proposal to the Kuwait government." But he acknowledged that Carlyle knew a proposal was being made to the government of Kuwait and that Carlyle stood to land a $1 billion investment. "We were aware of that. But we played no role in procuring that investment."

Asked if Carlyle was "willing to take the billion but not to try to get it," Ullman answered, "Correct."

Iraq is the most heavily indebted country in the world, owing roughly $200 billion in sovereign debts and in reparations from Saddam's wars. If Iraq were forced to pay even a quarter of these claims, its debt would still be more than double its annual GDP, severely undermining its capacity to pay for reconstruction or to address the humanitarian needs of its war-ravaged citizens. "This debt endangers Iraq's long-term prospects for political health and economic prosperity," President Bush said when he appointed Baker last December.

But critics expressed grave concern about whether Baker was an appropriate choice for such a crucial job. For instance, one of Iraq's largest creditors is the government of Saudi Arabia. The Carlyle Group does extensive business with the Saudi royal family, as does Baker's law firm, Baker Botts (which is currently defending them in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by the families of September 11 victims). The New York Times determined that the potential conflicts of interest were so great that on December 12 it published an editorial calling on Baker to resign his posts at the Carlyle Group and Baker Botts to preserve the integrity of the envoy position.

"Mr. Baker is far too tangled in a matrix of lucrative private business relationships that leave him looking like a potentially interested party in any debt-restructuring formula," stated the editorial. It concluded that it wasn't enough for Baker to "forgo earnings from clients with obvious connections to Iraqi debts.... To perform honorably in his new public job, Mr. Baker must give up these two private ones."

The White House brushed off calls for Baker to choose between representing the President and representing Carlyle investors. "I don't read those editorials," President Bush said when asked by a reporter about the Times piece. Bush assured reporters that "Jim Baker is a man of high integrity.... We're fortunate he decided to take time out of what is an active life...to step forward and serve America." Carlyle was equally adamant: Chris Ullman assured a Knight-Ridder reporter that Baker's post "will have no impact on Carlyle whatsoever."

In fact, several months earlier, on July 16, 2003, Carlyle had attended a high-level London meeting with Kuwaiti officials about the deal. According to the document, the Kuwaitis asked Carlyle and the other consortium members to "prepare a detailed financial proposal for the protection and monetization" of reparation debts from Iraq. But at the time Baker was appointed envoy, the consortium had not yet submitted its proposed plans to the Kuwait. That means that the Carlyle Group could have pulled out of the consortium, citing the potential conflicts of interest. Instead, Carlyle stayed on and the consortium proceeded to use Baker's powerful new position to aggressively pitch a deal that positioned the consortium as the Kuwaiti government's chief lobbyist on Iraq's debts and that gave Carlyle a clear stake in the fate of Iraq's debts.

However, several changes were made in the way the consortium presented itself. The documents state that, "Prior to [Baker's] appointment [former US Secretary of Defense Frank] Carlucci had played a convening and guiding role on behalf of Carlyle." But after the appointment, according to Carlyle's Chris Ullman, the firm's role was scaled back. "When James Baker was named special envoy...Carlyle explicitly restricted its role to only investing assets on behalf of Kuwait." Shahameen Sheikh, chairman and CEO of International Strategy Group, a company created by the consortium to manage this deal, said that Carlyle told her that "they are not a lobbying firm." Days before Baker's appointment, the consortium reached out to another high-profile Washington firm, the Albright Group, which eventually signed on as the leading political strategists and lobbyists for the consortium.

Moreover, Ullman said that Carlyle put "controls in place" that would insure that Baker "would play no role in nor benefit from" the proposed $1 billion investment—an amount that would constitute nearly 10 percent of Carlyle's total equity investments.

But it's not clear that Carlyle has been straightforward about its dealings so far. The day before Baker's appointment was announced, John Harris, managing director and chief financial officer of Carlyle, submitted a signed statement to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. "Carlyle does not have any investment in Iraqi public or private debt," he wrote. He didn't mention that Carlyle had for months been in negotiations with Kuwait to help secure its unpaid war debts from Iraq. Asked if the White House had been informed of the Carlyle Group's dealings with Kuwait at any point, Ullman replied, "I'll get back to you on that." He did not.

According to Kathleen Clark, the consortium's activities may be in violation of both criminal and regulatory statutes that prohibit government officials from participating in government business in which they have a financial interest—including matters that affect an outside company that employs the official. Clark notes, "even if Baker is somehow being screened from profiting from this deal, Carlyle is using Baker's government position to benefit themselves." She says it's time for Carlyle and the White House to come clean. "There's a tremendous need for transparency here." The White House and James Baker's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Baker occupies a complicated place in the consortium's January proposal—he is both problem and solution, stick and carrot. In the documents, Baker's name comes up repeatedly, usually in tones of high alarm. "Mr. Baker's new role and the likely emergence of what will be understood as a new round of global negotiations over Iraqi debt—casts all of these issues in a new light and gives them a new, perhaps even intense, sense of urgency," states a letter signed by Madeleine Albright; David Huebner, chairman of the Coudert Brothers law firm (another consortium member); and Shahameen Sheikh.

But after establishing Baker's envoy job as the embodiment of the threat that Kuwait will lose its reparations payments, the proposal goes on at length about the powerful individuals connected to the consortium who will "have the ability to gain access to the highest levels of the United States Government and other Security Council governments for a hearing of Kuwait's views." According to Levinson, "What they are proposing is to completely undercut Baker's mission—and they are using their connection with Baker to do it."

On January 21, 2004, James Baker's dual lives converged. That morning Baker flew to Kuwait as George Bush's debt envoy. He met with Kuwait's prime minister, its foreign minister and several other top officials with the stated goal of asking them to forgive Iraq's debts in the name of regional peace and prosperity.

Baker's colleagues in the consortium chose that very same day to hand-deliver their proposal to Foreign Minister Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah—the same man Baker was meeting. The proposal "takes into account the new dynamics that have developed in the region," states the cover letter, signed by Albright, Huebner and Sheikh—dynamics that include "Secretary Baker's negotiations" on debt relief. If Kuwait accepts the consortium's offer, they explain, "we will distinguish Kuwait's claims—legally and morally—from the sovereign debt for which the United States is now seeking forgiveness."

Was it a coincidence that the consortium submitted its proposal on the same day Baker was in Kuwait? And which James Baker were Kuwait's leaders supposed to take more seriously—the presidential envoy calling for debt forgiveness or the businessman named in the proposal as a potential ally in their quest for debt payment?

Ahamed al-Fahad, undersecretary to the prime minister of Kuwait, told The Nation, "I have seen it [the proposal] and I am fully aware of the situation." But when asked about Baker's dual role in Kuwait, he said, "It's hard to comment on that issue, especially now. I hope you fully understand."

Shahameen Sheikh, the consortium head who made the delivery, says the timing was a coincidence. "It had nothing to do with Mr. Baker's visit.... I was in the region so I thought I would stop over on the way to Europe and deliver the proposal."

We do know this: After meeting with Baker on January 21, Kuwait's foreign minister told reporters that Baker had shown "understanding of Kuwait's position on war reparations," confirming that the subject did come up. He also said that, while sovereign debt might be forgiven, reparations would not, because "there is an international decision from the UN."

Three days later, when Baker was back in Washington giving a speech, he made this distinction for the first time. "My job is to deal with Iraqi debt to sovereign creditors, not with war reparations," he said. He also echoed the exact line of the Kuwaiti government: that reparations are outside his purview because they are "under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Security Council and subject to resolutions it has passed."

This was a curious statement: Why would such a large portion of Iraq's debts be off the table? It also seemed to contradict other things Baker said in the same speech. He said that "any reduction [in Iraq's debt] must be substantial, or a vast majority of the total debt." That is impossible without addressing reparations, which by some measures account for more than half of Iraq's foreign debts. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, the center-right think tank hosting Baker's speech, has said it is "unwise" to make any debt relief plan "that does not include reparations."

Baker's statement on reparations also placed him at odds with several other members of the Bush Administration, including former chief envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer. "I think there needs to be a very serious look at this whole reparations issue," Bremer said in September 2003. He compared the Iraq situation to that of Germany after World War I, when the 1921 Reparations Commission forced the Weimar Republic to pay $33 billion. The massive reparations "contributed directly to the morass of unrest, instability and despair which led to Adolf Hitler's election," Bremer warned.

Yet Iraq continues to make regular reparations payments for Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In the eighteen months since the US invasion, Iraq has paid out a staggering $1.8 billion in reparations—substantially more than the battered country's 2004 health and education budgets combined, and more than the United States has so far managed to spend in Iraq on reconstruction.

Most of the payments have gone to Kuwait, a country that is about to post its sixth consecutive budget surplus, where citizens have an average purchasing power of $19,000 a year. Iraqis, by contrast, are living on an average of just over $2 a day, with most of the population dependent on food rations for basic nutrition. Yet reparations payments continue, with Iraq scheduled to make another $200 million payout in late October.

This arrangement dates back to the end of first Gulf War. As a condition of the cease-fire, Saddam Hussein agreed to pay for all losses incurred as a result of his invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait. Payments started flowing 1994 and sped up in 1996, with the start of the UN's oil-for-food program. According to UN Security Council Resolution 986, which created the program, Iraq could begin to export oil as long as the revenue was spent on food and medicine imports, and as long as 30 percent of Iraq's oil revenues went to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi-tribunal in charge of Gulf War reparations.

Some of the claims that have been awarded by the UNCC are huge: the cost of cleaning up Kuwait's and Saudi Arabia's coastlines from oil spills and fires, or the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation's controversial award for $15.9 billion in lost oil revenues. So far, the UNCC has paid out $18.6 billion in war reparations and has awarded an additional $30 billion that has not been paid because of Iraq's shortage of funds. There are still $98 billion worth of claims before the UNCC that have yet to be assessed, so these numbers could rise steeply. That's why there are no accurate estimates of how much Iraq owes in war reparations—the figure ranges from $50 billion to $130 billion.

But the fate of these debts is now highly uncertain. On May 22, 2003—two months after the United States invaded Iraq—the Security Council decided to cut the percentage of Iraqi oil revenues going to war reparations to 5 percent. This past May, an Iraqi delegation went to the UN to ask for the percentage to be reduced even further, to accommodate Iraq's own reconstruction needs. There is growing sympathy for this position. Justin Alexander of the debt relief group Jubilee Iraq says that many of the claims before the UNCC are inflated and that "even for genuine claims, this is Saddam's responsibility, not the Iraqi people's, who themselves suffered far more than anyone."

This is where the Carlyle/Albright consortium comes in. The premise of its proposal is that Iraq's unpaid debts to Kuwait are not just a financial problem but a political and public relations problem as well. Global public opinion is no longer what it was when Kuwait was promised full reparations. Now the world is focused on reconstructing Iraq and forgiving its debts. If Kuwait is going to get its reparations awards, the cover letter argues, it will need to recast them not as a burden on Iraq but "as a key element in working toward regional stability and reconciliation."

Several parties involved in the consortium emphasized that the proposal concerned only reparations debts. Albright Group spokesperson Jamie Smith said, "We were asked to join a proposal to secure justice for victims of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and ensure that compensation to Kuwaiti victims—which was endorsed by the US government and the United Nations—be used to promote reconciliation, environmental improvements and investment in Kuwait, Iraq and the region."

In fact, the proposal does not restrict itself to reparations debt. The consortium also asks the government of Kuwait to give the consortium control over $30 billion in defaulted sovereign debts to be used as political leverage to secure reparations claims. Furthermore, most experts on debt restructuring agree that Iraq's debts must be looked at as a whole: There is little point forgiving Iraq's sovereign debts if the country is still going to be saddled with an unmanageable reparations burden. This understanding is reflected in the documents, which repeatedly state that Kuwait's reparations payments are endangered by the moves to forgive Iraq's debts.

To avert this threat to Kuwait, the consortium proposes a three-pronged strategy of aggressive backroom lobbying, clever public relations and creative investing and financing. "Any solution for payment of the Unpaid Awards...must be politically sellable as reinforcing stability and growth in the Gulf and in Iraq. This Proposal provides the strategy, the architecture, and the talent to achieve this goal," the document states.

Lobbying: Since the UNCC exists entirely at the discretion of the Security Council, which can vote to reduce, suspend or eliminate reparations at any time, the part of the proposal dealing with power-brokering is straightforward: It suggests a full-on lobbying offensive directed at Security Council members, using Albright's connections, but also other "eminent" people associated with the consortium like former US Senator Gary Hart and former US ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick. "We will first seek to preserve the five percent of the revenues from Iraqi oil allocated as funding for payment of the UNCC awards," the proposal says. To achieve this, the consortium will make "discreet contacts at top levels in key capitals of Security Council member states and with influential representatives," and "interventions with United Nations senior staff to shape presentations to the Security Council." The proposal further notes that "Germany and Romania may be pivotal, and The Albright Group has very close ties to each."

Public Relations: The consortium also has a detailed plan to address the perception that reparations are "diverting resources from rebuilding Iraq to a more wealthy neighbor." First, Kuwait must assign its unpaid debts from Iraq to a private foundation controlled by the consortium. The foundation will manage an investment fund that will invest a portion of reparations payments from Iraq to Kuwait back into Iraq. As examples of the types of investments the foundation would make, Albright, Huebner and Sheikh suggest in their letter that the reparations funds could be used to buy Iraq's state-owned companies. "In the near future, 40 state-owned Iraqi enterprises in a range of sectors will be available for leasing and management contracts," they write. By demonstrating that Kuwait is investing part of its reparations proceeds back into Iraq's economy, the consortium-run foundation "establishes a humanitarian rationale for the United States and other counties to continue their support" for the reparations. The consortium appears to see privatization—a highly controversial proposal in Iraq—as part of a humanitarian mission.

The proposal also suggests more direct public relations strategies. It calls for Kuwait to dedicate $1 billion of the reparations awards it has already been paid by the UNCC to a Kuwait Environmental Restoration Fund, which the consortium would create. The purpose of this fund would be to remind the world of "the gravity of the environmental legacy facing Kuwait" and to "position Kuwait as the region's environmental leader." The fund would be headed by Carol Browner, former head of the US Environmental Protection Agency and a principal in the Albright Group.

Investment/Financing: The proposal predicts that on their own, lobbying and PR will not be sufficient to secure the amounts that the Kuwaiti government hopes to receive in reparations. For the consortium to "maximize the value of Kuwait's compensation," Kuwait will have to part with even more of the reparations payments it has received. In addition to the $1 billion for the environmental fund, the proposal calls for another $2 billion of Kuwaiti money to be invested in a Middle East Private Equity Fund. Of that $2 billion," $1 billion would be invested, by way of special agreement, in The Carlyle Group equity funds" for a period of at least twelve to fifteen years. At the end of that period Kuwait will get the return on these investments, as well as whatever the consortium has been able to negotiate in reparations payments.

For the consortium, it is an excellent deal: Its members get to manage a $2 billion investment portfolio, collecting healthy management fees as well as a percentage of interest. They also will be paid a "retainer" and 5 percent of any debts the consortium gets repaid, and "a negotiated percentage of the value returned to Kuwait exceeding" the pre-arranged amount.

Other consortium members sharing in these benefits include Fidelity Investments; BNP Paribas, a European bank embroiled in the oil-for-food scandal; Gaffney, Cline & Associates, an energy company specializing in oil and gas privatization; Nexgen Financial Solutions, a financial engineering firm partly owned by the government of France; and Emerging Markets Partnership, an AIG affiliate headed by a former senior vice president of the World Bank, Moeen Qureshi.

In addition to the financial windfall, the arrangement would give this group of private companies tremendous power. Whoever holds Iraq's debt has the ability to influence policy in Iraq at a moment of extreme political uncertainty. Yet for the government of Kuwait the proposed deal is fraught with risk. It's true that the fate of its Iraqi reparations looks grim. The consortium estimated that if Kuwait tried to sell those debts on the market, its $27 billion would be worth only $1.5 billion. But the consortium is asking Kuwait to risk $3 billion of reparations money it has already received in the hope that it can be used to leverage some of the rest. However, as Jerome Levinson points out, "There are absolutely no guarantees of even that."

It is clear that the consortium is extremely eager to seal a deal with Kuwait. Consortium CEO Shahameen Sheikh writes of making five trips to Kuwait in four months; Albright met with Kuwait's foreign minister about the issue on April 2, 2004; and the Albright Group's Carol Browner is reported to have "personally delivered a copy" of the proposal to his hotel when he was in Washington. Yet Kuwait appears reluctant: It took four months to reply to the proposal and then it would only say, in a letter dated August 10, that the proposal "will be taken into deep consideration and is currently being studied by the appropriate authorities." According to Ahamed al-Fahad, "The issue is now in the hands of the under secretary of foreign affairs," who was unavailable for comment. But Salem Abdullah al Jaber al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, said, "As far as my information is concerned, my government is not considering such proposals."

Even if the deal falls through, the fact that the Carlyle Group and the Albright Group have been engaged in these negotiations may already have damaged debt relief efforts, hurting both Iraqi and US interests. Levinson points out that the Bush Administration has made commitments that Iraq's oil revenues will be spent on reconstruction. Yet the failure to deal with the reparations issue means that "part of those resources instead are being diverted to Kuwait. Who pays for this? It's the people of Iraq who continue to make reparations payments, and it's US taxpayers, who are asked to foot the bill for reconstruction, because Iraq's money is going to debt payments."

Levinson says this is all the more remarkable because of who is involved. "Here you have two former Secretaries of State seemingly proposing to use their contacts and inside information to undercut the official US government policy." Washington University's Kathleen Clark says the proposal "lays bare how former high-level government employees use their access in order to reap financial benefits that appear to be enormous."

A case can certainly be made that James Baker and Madeleine Albright have had more direct influence over Iraq's debts and reparations payments than any politicians outside Iraq, with the possible exception of the forty-first and forty-third Presidents of the United States.

As Secretary of State, Baker played a role in running up Iraq's foreign debts in the first place, personally intervening in 1989 to secure a $1 billion US loan to Saddam Hussein in export credits. He was also a key architect of the first Gulf War, as well as of the cease-fire that required Saddam to pay such sweeping reparations. In his 1995 memoirs, The Politics of Diplomacy, Baker wrote that after seeing the oil-well fires in Kuwait he cabled President George H.W. Bush and said, "Iraq should pay for it." Now, through the consortium, Carlyle could end up controlling $1 billion of those payments.

The role of the Albright Group raises similar questions. As Secretary of State and Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright participated personally in drafting UN Resolution 986, which created the oil-for-food program, diverting 30 percent of Iraq's revenue from oil sales to war reparations. "It's a great day for the United States because we were the authors of Resolution 986," she said on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on May 20, 1996. Now, as a private citizen, Albright is a leading member of a consortium that is exploiting her connections to try to profit from the very reparations she helped secure. Albright also enforced the brutal sanctions campaign against Iraq, one of the effects of which was the hobbling of Iraq's state companies. Now, she is part of a plan to use Iraq's reparations payments to buy the very firms that her sanctions program helped to debilitate.

But it is Baker's envoy post that raises the most serious questions for the White House, especially because a Special Presidential Envoy is the President's personal representative, meeting with heads of state in the President's stead and reporting back directly to the President. If a President's envoy has a conflict of interest, it reflects directly on the highest office. Clark says, "There is absolutely a conflict of interest. Baker is aligned with two parties—the US government and Carlyle—that are not aligned with each other."

As envoy, Baker's job is to do his best to clear away Iraq's debts, lessening the burden on Iraqis and on US taxpayers. Yet as a businessman, he is an equity partner in a company that is part of a deal that would achieve the opposite result. If Baker the envoy succeeds, Baker's business partners stand to fail—and vice versa.

Have these conflicts influenced Baker's performance as envoy? Has he pushed as hard as he could have for debt forgiveness? We know that Iraq's steep war reparations to Kuwait have largely escaped public scrutiny—if Baker has steered the Bush Administration away from the reparations issue, for whom was he working at the time? The White House? Or Carlyle? Clark says questions like these are precisely why conflict-of-interest regulations exist. "We have reason to doubt that Baker is doing everything he could be doing on behalf of the United States because he has an interest in another side of the transaction."

This issue is all the more pressing because the file that President Bush handed to Baker is in disarray—ten months on, there is significantly less goodwill toward forgiving Iraq's debt than when Baker arrived. When President Bush appointed him, he praised Baker's "vast economic, political and diplomatic experience." And at first, Baker seemed to be making fast progress: After top-level meetings, France, Russia and Germany appeared open to cancelling a large proportion of debt owed to them by Iraq, and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait seemed ready to follow.

But now, the negotiations are not only stalled, they seem to be going backwards. Kuwait, for its part, has hardened its position. "Debts remain debts," Foreign Minister Mohammad Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah said recently. And it has intensified its demands for Gulf War reparations, joining with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria to claim an additional $82 billion from Iraq in environmental damages.

And the Europeans? At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 15, Senator Joseph Biden Jr. asked Ronald Schlicher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq, about the status of the international negotiations.

"Has a single nation in the G8...formally said or requested of their parliaments to forgive Iraqi debt?" Biden asked.

"Not yet. No sir," Schlicher replied.

Not only has Baker failed to deliver any firm commitments for debt forgiveness, at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund on October 2, it emerged that France had done an end run around Washington and was pushing a debt-relief deal of its own. French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he had lined up Russia, Germany and Italy behind a plan to cancel only 50 percent of Iraq's debts—a far cry for the 90-95 percent cancellation Washington had been demanding. Yet Baker was nowhere to be found.

Busy negotiating the rules of the presidential debates, Baker has been MIA on the debt issue. Since he returned from his trip to the Middle East in January, the President's envoy has issued only two public statements on Iraq's debt, and he has been completely silent on the topic for the past six months—despite having publicly committed to getting the debt issue sewn up by the end of the year.

While this is bad news for Iraqis and for US taxpayers, it could be good news for Carlyle. A swift resolution to Iraq's debt crisis works against its financial interest: The longer the negotiations drag on, the more time the Consortium has to convince the reluctant Kuwaiti government to sign on the dotted line. But if Iraq's debt is successfully wiped out, any proposed deal is off the table.

Baker's position as envoy has certainly been useful to his colleagues in the consortium. Whether Baker has helped solve Iraq's debt crisis is far less clear.

This article first appeared in The Nation.

I haven't learned what actually happened with this deal, except that Carlylye said it pulled out of it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/02/iraq.comment

The Manchurian cover-up

Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Tuesday 2 November 2004

Revelations that the Carlyle Group was involved in a secret deal to profit from Iraq's debt have vanished under a spell of silence

Less than 24 hours after it was disclosed that former secretary of state James Baker and the Carlyle Group were involved in a secret deal to profit from Iraq's debt to Kuwait, NBC was reporting that the deal was "dead". At The Nation magazine, which broke the story that was then carried on these pages, we started to get congratulatory calls.

They were commending us for costing the Carlyle Group $1bn, the sum the company would have received in an investment from the government of Kuwait in exchange for helping to extract $27bn of unpaid debts from Iraq.

We were flattered (sort of), until we realised that Carlyle had just pulled off a major PR coup. When the story broke, the notoriously secretive merchant bank needed to find a way to avoid a full-blown political scandal. It chose a bold tactic: in the face of overwhelming evidence of a glaring conflict of interest between Baker's stake in Carlyle and his post as George Bush's special envoy on Iraq's debt, Carlyle simply denied everything. The company issued a statement saying that it does not want to be involved in the Kuwait deal "in any way, shape or form and will not invest any money raised by the consortium's efforts" and, furthermore, that "Carlyle was never a member of the consortium". A spokesperson told the Financial Times that Carlyle had pulled out as soon as Baker was appointed debt envoy, because his new political post made Carlyle's involvement "unsuitable".

Mysteriously, there was no paper trail - just Carlyle's word that it had informed its business partners "orally". You have to hand it to them: it was gutsy. In the leaked business proposal from the consortium to the Kuwaiti government - submitted almost two months after James Baker's appointment - the Carlyle Group is named no fewer than 47 times; it is listed first among the companies involved in the consortium; and its partner James Baker is mentioned by name at least 11 times. In interviews, other consortium members, including Madeleine Albright's consulting firm, the Albright Group, confirmed that Carlyle was still involved, as did the office of the Prime Minister of Kuwait. Shahameen Sheikh, the consortium's CEO, told me that when Baker was named envoy in December, Carlyle was "very clear with us that they wanted to restrict their role to fund managers", but she said the firm was very much still a part of the deal.

That was exactly what Carlyle spokesman Christopher Ullman had told me. He also admitted that Carlyle would land a $1bn investment if the proposal was accepted. After I reported these facts, Ullman even called to thank me for quoting him accurately. So when I heard about Carlyle's about-face, I called Ullman to see what was up. I felt like I was talking to one of the brainwashed characters in The Manchurian Candidate, the Jonathan Demme remake about a Carlyle-esque company that conspires to put a mind-controlled candidate in the Oval Office. "We learned today that we did not even join the consortium," Ullman told me. "When I spoke to you yesterday, I did not know that." Amazingly, it worked. The story - which made front-page news around the world - vanished.

The New York Times has not printed a word about Baker's conflict, despite the fact that when Baker was first appointed envoy, it called on him to resign from Carlyle in order to "perform honourably in his new public job". The Kerry campaign has been equally silent, apparently for fear that any criticism would boomerang onto the Democrats because of Albright. This was Carlyle's stroke of genius: when Baker was appointed, the consortium recruited Albright to front the deal; when they got caught, Carlyle denied all involvement and left a prominent Democrat holding the bag. As the story disappeared under Carlyle's spell, it was as if the entire US media had been implanted with Manchurian memory chips. Here was hard evidence that the Carlyle Group - the "ex-presidents' club", run like a secret society - had participated in a scheme to use Baker to undermine US policy, possibly in violation of conflict-of-interest regulations, including criminal statutes. Yet Carlyle was slipping out of reach once again.

The central question remains unanswered by the White House: have Baker's business interests compromised his performance as debt envoy? That question does not go away simply because $1bn will stay in the coffers of a wealthy oil emirate rather than in a Carlyle equity fund. The week after losing the deal, Carlyle handed a record-breaking $6.6bn payout to investors.

In Iraq, the last 18 months have been markedly worse, and the stakes for Baker's job performance there are considerably higher. This was underlined on October 13, when Iraq's health ministry issued a harrowing report on its post-invasion health crisis, including outbreaks of typhoid and TB and soaring child and mother mortality rates. A week after the report, Iraq paid out another $195m for war reparation debts, mostly to Kuwait. Meanwhile, the state department announced that $3.5bn for water, sanitation and electricity projects was being shifted to security in Iraq, claiming that, according to deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, debt relief is on the way.

Is it? In fact, Iraq is being plunged deeper into debt, with $836m in new loans and grants now flowing from the IMF and the World Bank. Meanwhile, Baker has not managed to get a single country to commit to eradicating Iraq's debts. Iraq's creditors know that while Baker was asking them to show forgiveness, his company was offering Kuwait a special side deal to push Iraq to pay up. It's not the kind of news that tends to generate generosity and goodwill. And the timing couldn't be worse: the Paris Club is about to meet to hash out a final deal on Iraq's debt.

But that doesn't happen until November 17. And if 2000 is any indication, by then Baker could be on to bigger deals. Look out for him in swing states, if another election needs stealing.

A version of this column was first published in The Nation

Sorry this post is so long; for those who haven't seen this story it's worth reading.

[JackRiddler]

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What does one read above? The 1991 war by the US-led coalition killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It destroyed the country's infrastructure, poisoned the water supply, and spread toxins including DU all over the countryside. Sanctions were then imposed on Iraq by the UN Security Council, supposedly targeting Saddam's WMD programs. Although the Iraqi WMD programs were destroyed within about a year, the sanctions were kept in place. The sanctions regime was established by Resolution 661, which had been pushed through by US bullying, and enforced by US (and UK) power for 13 years under Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. until 2003. The sanctions denied to Iraq many goods essential for recovery and for medical care, as well as food imports. This contributed to a steep rise in mortality rates during this period, such that an estimated one million more Iraqis, mostly children, died during those 13 years than would have died without the sanctions.

The sanctions were war, punctuated by frequent bombings of targets both inside and outside the US-UK imposed "no-fly zones," with escalated bombings after 1997. At some early point in the process the additional suffering and death they caused could be called murder, even genocide. Not only did they have nothing to do with WMD that the UN and US knew all along had been destroyed; they also served to cement Saddam Hussein's rule during this time, a further dire consequence for Iraqis.

All this is true.

So why do you need that headline? What does it accomplish, since it's not true? "Bill Clinton killed a million Iraqis" is a statement tailor-made to be rejected by those who don't want to admit that the UN sanctions regime -- imposed by US power under two Bushes and Clinton -- was deeply inhumane and cruel and indirectly caused the deaths of as many as one million Iraqis. (This is, of course, difficult to gauge, as it proceeds from an argument based in mortality rates and how they would have differed without sanctions; there is no doubt fewer people would have died without the sanctions, and that the sanctions were therefore criminal, but quantifying that is subject to legitimate debate.)

Furthermore, the headline is not Andrew Cockburn's, although you have make it look above as though it is. You wrote it like this: "Bill Clinton Killed a Million Iraqis – Andrew Cockburn on the Invisible War." However, at the link (http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/10/21/andrew-cockburn-2/) we see that this is not the headline, but a comment from a reader called Sam. That is misleading. I doubt Cockburn would want to see his work go out under that headline without a clarification that it's your headline, not his.

You don't need to convince me of anything, and I'm not defending Clinton, who presided over 8/13 of the sanctions period and took steps to intensify the sanctions and the bombings after no doubt remained that the reasons claimed for them were bogus. If you wrote that Charles Manson killed 40 people, and I responded by saying it was the whole group he led that appears to have killed a dozen on his orders, that would not be a defense of Manson. If you wrote that Hitler killed about 10-12 million captive civilians, and I said it was the crime of a large one-party-state backed by the German establishment (and popular with the people), with up to half a million perpetrators wittingly involved in the machinery of killing, that would not be a defense of Hitler.

I recognize that Clinton (like Obama) is and was an important but lower-order tool in a system of empire within which the Bushes and their extensive mafia rank higher (one piece of evidence is that it's still one of the top Bush mob satraps in charge at the Pentagon today, under the ostensible Obama government). Although the system would also exist without the Bush mob. Something we often mistakenly call "America" or "us," the US government and the imperial system run out of the Pentagon and intel complex, killed those people, with Clinton as the willing civilian front-man for eight years and therefore among those most responsible.

Do you want to convince, or just provoke?

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