Chapter 3 : The Negotiation (1)

3. THE NEGOTIATION (1)

UN Security Council, New York, 2001

What is a fact?

This was not a post-modern philosophical debate; it was a negotiation of what was to become international law. But this essential question bedeviled our discussion. We could not agree on the facts.

We were meeting day after day, for several hours at a time. Our discussions took place in a narrow, cramped room called the NAM caucus room. NAM is the acronym for the Non-Aligned Movement, the grouping of those states that during the Cold War saw themselves as associated with neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. Although the Cold War is over, the NAM lives on, as does its room, which is next to the room next to the UN Security Council (perhaps a situational reflection of the NAM’s distant relationship to real power). The room is too small for the NAM, which has 116 members; indeed it is too small for the fifteen delegates of the members of the Security Council. The table only accommodated ten people, tightly squeezed together, so whoever entered the room last had no seat at the table, and was forced to sit on the uncomfortable chairs behind, lining the wall. When the negotiations began, there would be an ungentlemanly rush for the table seats, and whoever was last in the room would have to spend the next several hours awkwardly balancing their negotiating papers on their knees. However, this problem did not last long. After the first few days, some of the smaller nonpermanent[11] Council delegates stopped bothering to attend the negotiations at all, even though their countries would have to vote on the outcome.

It might seem cynical or even idle not to bother to attend negotiations on such an important subject as the future of sanctions on Iraq. But these were small delegations, heavily overloaded with the many agenda items on the Security Council, and the truth was that they were irrelevant. Some of the more competent nonpermanent delegations were often able to make a meaningful contribution to Council negotiations, despite the limitations of their tiny size (they might have three or four overworked diplomats covering the entire agenda of the Council, where Britain, by contrast, had at least a dozen). But their role was really more that of spectators at the main fight. We all knew that they would vote for whatever outcome the permanent members could agree to, and they knew it too. So not bothering to attend was, in a sense, entirely rational on their part. It also meant that there was more room at the table.

Our negotiation was to agree the terms of what we called the “rollover” of the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Every six months the terms of the program had to be negotiated afresh in order for the Council to agree, by adopting a new resolution, to implement the program. But although technically this was what the negotiation was about, the actual discussion was concerned with how much or how little we were going to ease sanctions on Iraq, for the resolution on the Oil-for-Food program also stipulated, in arcane yet often imprecise detail, what Iraq could and could not import or export, and how these flows were to be regulated.[12]

And this was why we couldn’t agree the facts. By 2001, when this negotiation took place, the debate over sanctions on Iraq had calcified into two opposing and entirely incompatible views.

On the one side were us (the British) and the Americans, with perhaps one or two sympathetic nonpermanent members, like the Dutch, and on the other everyone else, led by the French and, less articulately, by the Russians. The US/UK view was that sanctions were essential in the face of Iraq’s noncompliance with its obligations to disarm of its Weapons of Mass Destruction.[13] If there was humanitarian suffering in Iraq, it was the fault of the Iraqi government for its failure to comply with its disarmament obligations and for failing to implement properly the Oil-for-Food program, which since 1996 had existed to allow Iraq to purchase, through the UN, necessary humanitarian supplies, including all types of food and medicine.

To justify our argument we could deploy a whole array of “facts”, for example that in northern Iraq, where the UN rather than the Iraqi government was in charge of running the program, hospitals and schools were being set up and operated smoothly, and supplies were being successfully delivered to those who needed them (indeed, so successful was the Oil-for-Food program in the north that the Kurdish parties would lobby us to make sure that it wouldn’t be stopped if sanctions ever had to be lifted). Another fact consisted of the reports of the UN administrators of the program, the Office of the Iraq Program, which suggested that it was delivering humanitarian improvements. In addition, a routine argument used by our politicians was the fact that Saddam was building and furnishing lavish palaces while his people were suffering (we tended not to use this argument in negotiation; somehow it seemed too crude and propagandist, something we diplomats were supposed to be above). We could cite import orders, placed through the UN (as all import orders, legal ones at least, had to be) for ludicrously unnecessary goods, like 10,000 tons (yes, tons) of neckties or 25,000 musical doorbells. Cigarettes and whiskey were being imported by the regime in vast quantities. All of this meant that it was all the fault of the government of Iraq, not of sanctions, if people were suffering.

On the other side, the opponents of sanctions had assembled an equally devastating array of “facts”. They cited evidence of hospitals without medicines, undernourished children, schools with neither books nor desks, sewage systems without spare parts, power stations that didn’t work, ambulances without tires. They could trot out one report after another, some from NGOs, some from the Iraqi government (which surpassed itself in the hysterical language it used to describe the suffering of the Iraqi people) and some from the UN. Most famously, there was a UNICEF report which, projecting from mortality data from before the first Gulf War, estimated that some 500,000 children had died in the period since sanctions were first imposed, deaths that would not have occurred if pre-sanctions mortality rates had remained stable. This rather complicated and measured judgment had been spun by opponents of sanctions into the statement that sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children, which, UNICEF would say, was an oversimplification of their conclusion (even if it might nevertheless be true). And simplification begets exaggeration, as Osama bin Laden was later to say that sanctions had killed two million Iraqi children.

To each and every fact on either side of the argument, we developed counter-facts. When others raised the UNICEF report, we would politely nod and say something like: yes, that’s a serious figure but (cue frown) it is based on Iraqi government figures — which it was — and (suck teeth) I’m afraid we cannot treat those as reliable. And to every one of our arguments, the French and Russians deployed their own battery of rebuttals. They would argue, for instance, that the northern provinces of Iraq received a disproportionately large share of the proceeds from the Oil-for-Food program (which was true, although the disproportion was not enough to explain the difference in welfare in the north). The egregious examples of Iraqi government wastage and inefficiency did not show that sanctions should continue in their current form, etc. On both sides there were skilled diplomats who spent their time scouring UN reports and writing briefs, dedicating their intelligence and energy to rubbishing one another. If the negotiations became stuck, as they always did, at the level of the delegates or “experts”,[14] as they are known in the insider language of the Security Council, we would organize a round of negotiation at ambassador level. There exactly the same arguments would be repeated, except by different people and with more or less fluency, depending on the individual — the Russian ambassador, for instance, was not only a brilliant and lucid advocate in English, but also had a thorough familiarity with the arguments. The only other significant difference was that the ambassadorial discussion would take place in another room, this time the “informal” Security Council chamber.

The result, needless to say, was total deadlock. Negotiation became a tedious recitation of their “facts” and our “facts”, thrown to and fro across the table. We only persisted in this trench warfare because each of us was trying to convince the nonpermanent members that we were right, in the hope that this would convince them later to vote for this or that proposal in the resolution. This too was largely a waste of time since they knew that any of the permanent members could block any proposal they didn’t like, and in any case the crossfire of arguments soon made the debate unintelligible. It got so bad that we would reject anything the French and Russians proposed simply because it was their proposal, and vice versa. Indeed, on several occasions we would introduce a new proposal (say, to modify some aspect of the process to screen exports to Iraq) only to have it opposed without concession by the other side. Then, six months later, come the next “rollover” debate, they would propose exactly the same idea, only this time we would oppose it, because we couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some hidden catch which would allow the Iraqi regime and their allies a loophole.

You will notice one major absentee in this discussion: the Iraqi people themselves. As we irritably traded arguments in the NAM caucus room, ordinary Iraqis were struggling with a defunct economy, eking out their dwindling incomes and coping. It is all too easy to see now how their fates could become a debating point in a fetid negotiation chamber. What we all lacked in that nasty overheated little room was any sense of what was really going on. Almost every source of information was in some way compromised and thus could be dismissed by one side or the other. For the British and Americans we could always deploy one argument if all others failed, and this was that any report coming out of Iraq was inevitably questionable since organizations could only operate there under the supervision of the Iraqi government. Even the UN itself could not be impartial: we suspected some agencies of becoming “politicized” (as if everything was not already politicized in this debate), led by people with an “agenda”. Other agencies were less suspect, and it was their reports that we tended to quote. Thus observers of the debate were treated to the absurd spectacle of each side quoting supposedly impartial UN reports at one another — and, as Germaine Greer once said, “all quotations are taken out of context: that’s what they are.”[15] All our information was out of context.

However, I should not play this “he says, she says” point too far. The absence of good, hard, reliable data and our own skill at demolishing our opponents’ arguments helped us avoid a very important truth, perhaps even The Truth. There may not have been good facts, but that should not have prevented us from seeing the obvious. After several rounds of this type of discussion, I began to find it deeply disturbing. There is something very wrong about sitting around a table in New York arguing about how many children are dying in Iraq and whose fault it was. By 2001 I had been doing the job for over three years. I had met a large number of UN staffers and NGO workers, as well as many diplomats from other countries who were present in Iraq (neither we nor the Americans had had diplomatic relations and thus embassies in Baghdad since the invasion of Kuwait), and even the occasional “real” (i.e. non-government) Iraqi. These were not people with an “agenda”. And they all agreed on one point. Things were bad and had been bad for a long time. I slowly realized, as I should have done long before, that it was much more important to do what we could to ameliorate the situation than to expend our energies attributing blame for it.

This realization had begun slowly to filter into the British government more generally. The lobby against sanctions in Britain was considerably more vociferous and well-organized than in the US (perhaps simply because of proximity). Our ministers were finding it increasingly hard to justify sanctions in the face of pictures of children dying for lack of necessary drugs or overflowing sewage systems (they were not as practiced as the diplomats were in firing off the barrage of counter arguments, tending instead to rely on the weaker forms of generalized propaganda — palaces and whiskey again). A polemical film against sanctions by John Pilger had made a particular impact (it was never shown on general release in the US). And so the government decided to review its policy.

A policy review sounds grand, but it is not. The term conjures up images of learned mandarins bent over reams of documents, scrutinizing, examining, weighing up the options. When we at the Mission were told there would be a review, I imagined thoughtful missives bouncing around between embassies and the Foreign Office, ministers, experts, civil servants all joined together in a common endeavor, the select, the policymakers. We were clever, we were concerned, we would get it right. I was wrong.

The review began in early 1999 and it was not complete until the next year. It consisted largely of a desultory exchange of ill-informed letters from senior officials. Most of them were so ignorant of the existing measures that they would propose changes that had long ago been introduced. All of our views, including mine, were uninhibited by any connection with empirical reality on the ground. One official, from the Ministry of Defense, opined in strong terms that since sanctions would “never work”, the only recourse was military action (my colleagues and I at the mission thought this laughable at the time, little realizing what was later to follow). Contributions from our embassies in the region were facile, “The [insert name of Arab population] will welcome some easing of sanctions, as there is considerable concern on the street[16] at their humanitarian impact.” And, this being government, the review was secret. We might mutter to a few other diplomats that we were “having a think” about sanctions, but the large number of NGOs and concerned individuals — humanitarian experts, academics — who had taken an interest in this controversial issue were ignored, unless we the officials happened to bother to read their reports, which most of us didn’t. We were too busy.

Part of the problem was that sanctions policy was so complex that only a very few people understood it. At the Mission, most of our contributions to the review consisted of correcting the misunderstandings of other senior officials. Only when a particular individual was put in charge of the whole review did any coherence start to emerge. He took the trouble to spend some time on the subject, and learn some of its intricacies. Whenever ministers became involved, the debate would have to be reduced to such a level of simplicity that all meaning was removed. One particular minister would occasionally touch on the subject with his American opposite number. The records would show that a few generalities would be exchanged, “yes, I agree we need a rethink, better focus, that kind of thing”. Then the conversation would move on to more exciting topics, with the details, as ever, “left for the officials”. The trouble was that the details were the policy. Only once, much later, in this long process did one minister — to his great credit — bother to get to grips with the detail. We were in the thick of trying to persuade the Russian foreign minister to accept what had become our new revised sanctions proposal. At his request, I wrote the minister a 20-page brief on the topic. He read it that night and the next day deployed it to devastating effect. Ivanov appeared completely stunned.

After several tortuous months of the review, we managed to agree inside the Foreign Office on what we should do. The summary of the idea was simple: the present situation was that Iraq was not allowed to import anything except those goods which were explicitly approved by the UN Sanctions Committee. Now, we would allow Iraq to import anything except those items which were explicitly prohibited. A sort of reversal. The concept was neat — good for soundbites — but the details were complicated and difficult. Moreover, before we could even begin to persuade the Security Council to adopt the new system, we had to persuade the Americans. This was to prove much harder than we anticipated, because the State Department, unlike the British government, was under no political pressure to alter sanctions at all. On the contrary, they were worried that any new system would be condemned by the Republican right as “going soft” on Saddam (this was during the last days of the Clinton administration). The complexity of the policy also meant that our ministers were rarely able to exert any leverage in their contacts with the Americans (leaving it to the officials, invariably). However, long sessions at “State” (as we insiders call it) and endless cajoling telegrams to get “London” to pressure “Washington” eventually had their effect.

And so, with the Americans somewhat reluctantly on board, we went to the Security Council and proposed our new measure, soon to be characterized by the press, though never by us, as “smart sanctions” (inviting the obvious retort, from Iraq’s Deputy Prime minister Tariq Aziz, that previous sanctions had been “stupid”). And thus it was that I found myself chairing a meeting of the Security Council “experts” to try to get them to agree to it. (Since it was our proposal, we had taken it upon ourselves to convene and chair the meetings.)

It was at first a thrill to negotiate international law for one’s country. When I first did it, at the beginning of my tour in New York, I would bound out of bed every morning at the excitement of the prospect. I remember being so thrilled that I whooped to myself in the shower: wow, this was the business, the hard core. But by the time we came to negotiate “smart sanctions” (we soon wearily accepted the name; everyone else was using it), I was a little more jaded. This was my seventh “rollover” of the Oil-for-Food program. Most of the “experts” had changed, but the arguments had remained the same. Indeed, it felt as if I was stuck in an unfunny diplomatic version of “Groundhog Day” with the same episode being replayed over and over again. You say “civilian deprivation”; I say “Iraqi non-cooperation”. Fresh ideas were hard to come by, and even when they appeared, they were invariably rejected. This new initiative — smart sanctions — was fresher and better than most, but our clever new weapon failed to alter the nature of the war — we were back in the trenches, hurling the same old canards, and I was still stuck in that same horrid airless NAM caucus room.

This time round the atmosphere was particularly bad. Years of argument had entrenched deep animosities among the “experts”. National differences had become personal feuds. When the American delegate spoke, the French would stare at the ceiling and smirk. When the French had their turn, the Americans would shuffle their papers and whisper to one another. It was unpleasant to be in that room. And it became clear, soon after we began, that we would be stuck there for a very long time.

The Americans felt that since they were offering such a massive new concession, everyone should gratefully accept it without question. The French and Russians, unaccustomed to such flexibility, were exaggeratedly suspicious, querying every tiny detail for fear that we were deceitfully introducing some new and unwarranted means of control. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government hated the new scheme, realizing that if it worked as we hoped, it would remove once and for all the humanitarian argument to lift sanctions. To what extent their opposition to the initiative played a part in French and Russian hostility, I do not know and only those governments could answer (and they will not do so), but the fact that the Iraqi government was so implacably against the scheme did nothing to help our cause, whatever the cynicism lying behind their reasons. All this produced the ingredients for yet another nasty, slow and unproductive negotiation.

After the talks began late one week, I returned to London to attend the wedding of an old friend. The event was a respite from my dessicating work in New York and the singing of the choir uplifted me. On the flight back to New York, an idea occurred to me. The following Monday, my colleague and I took a portable music player into the NAM caucus room. I made a suggestion. Why didn’t we take it in turns to play a song at the beginning of each session?

I turned to my colleague, and he turned on a CD from the British singer, formerly of The Jam, Paul Weller:

Day by day
Going, just where I’m going
Getting to where
We should be going

The delegates would usually fidget and chatter at the beginning of each session. It would take several minutes for people to settle down and work, and longer still for them to listen to each other. This time it was different. Silence fell as the song began; a sense of tranquility spread among us. I caught the eye of the Bangladeshi delegate and he smiled. After the song, I asked G. to explain why he had chosen it and why he liked it. The other delegates listened quietly. And, when we began our discussions, going line-byline through the draft resolution we had proposed, the rancor and acidulous tone of earlier sessions had disappeared. The differences of substance were still as acute, but the acrimony had passed. The next day the Chinese delegate brought in a beautiful, haunting tune from medieval China relating, he told us, the last moments of a doomed general as he faced his enemy. The day after that, the Bangladeshi brought in a love song, sung by a shepherd in the vast delta at the heart of that country, a song of unrequited love.

And so the negotiations proceeded. One afternoon, the Reuters correspondent at the UN telephoned me at the mission. She had seen us carrying the music player into the NAM caucus room. The French delegate had told her what it was for. She asked me to confirm the story and, since there was no point in denying it, I did. She ran the story, and from there, things began to get out of hand. Just as our own discussions bore precious little relation to the realities of life in Iraq, the representations of our music initiative had even scantier connection to what was going on in that little room. The BBC got hold of the story and managed to interview Paul Weller about the use of his song. Generously, he said he was pleased and that it was somehow appropriate that we had used his song to calm hostilities because it was about love. They also interviewed a professor of music, who was intrigued that we had chosen nonlinguistic negotiating techniques. The British press began to run the story, as did some of the US press. Then the Iraqi ambassador was interviewed about it and expressed his outrage that we were trivializing the fate of his people. Inspired perhaps by this, the Tunisian ambassador raised a complaint in a formal session of the Security Council (his delegate in the room had told me he had enjoyed the music and was busy planning his own song). We had to stop. But the story did not need our music to keep running. It now circled the world with articles in Europe, Asia and, above all, the Middle East. An anti-sanctions campaigner wrote to a mass-market British newspaper saying that I was a disgrace to the British foreign service.

It was uncomfortable for once to be the object rather than the subject. Diplomats, particularly British ones who speak with a comfortable anonymity (“British diplomats said”, “Western officials commented”), are used to privacy. Only rarely do we find ourselves in the ungenerous light of publicity. At first, I enjoyed the attention and felt rather clever and pleased with myself (a German diplomat approached me in the corridors of the UN and said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard of). As the commentary turned more critical, I naturally liked it less and I began to realize how our actions would be seen. We were used to carrying on in private — now for once, our machinations were public and it became clear that the world, when it saw what we were up to, would not be wholly approving. The music in the Security Council became a Rorschach test for the Iraqi sanctions debate. In the US press, and mostly in the British press too, in such comment as there was, this was an amusing, somewhat curious little incident.[17] In the Arab press, our music was seen as yet another example of the crass inhumanity of western diplomats, dancing on the graves of Iraqi children.

The negotiations moved on to the deadline of the end of that six-month span of the Oil-for-Food program. Music notwithstanding, we failed to overcome the objections of the Russians (the French came around sooner): there were more questions over the contents of the lists of prohibited items than there was time to resolve, and for months to come the US was mired in highly complex negotiations over the specifications of prohibited goods.[18] Iraqi resistance remained intractable. Our smart sanctions would have to wait for the next rollover six months later, when they were at last agreed. G. was in charge of the negotiations this time: I had volunteered to serve a brief spell in our embassy in Kabul. There was no music, just G’s quiet professionalism to guide the negotiations. And they managed to agree. But by then Washington was well on its way to deciding an altogether different course, and smart sanctions was no longer seen as the necessary redeemer of a bad policy.

Sanctions on Iraq were inhumane and I was intimately involved in both their maintenance and their design. Many people suffered as a result of our misconceived policy. Somehow, in our creation of two irreconcilable narratives of what was “really” going on, reality — at least that of the Iraqi people — got lost. How did this happen?

A traditional analysis would portray this episode as a tale of an inevitable collision of the irreconcilable interests of nation states sitting on the Council. US interests were to maintain sanctions (despite the later claims of the US and UK governments, our internal assessments were that sanctions were highly effective in preventing significant rearmament by Iraq). British interests were to ameliorate the effects of sanctions in order to improve their international acceptability, and thus to maintain them. The Russians and French would say that their interest was to make sure that our new sanctions initiative did not in fact make matters worse for the Iraqi population (there were indeed some grounds for supposing that the elaborate new system we had designed would, at least initially, make it more complicated to export goods to Iraq). But both of course had substantial economic interests at stake too: the Iraqi regime had signed contracts with a number of Russian, French and Chinese oil companies for the exploitation of Iraq’s enormous reserves when sanctions were lifted.

Put more critically, all of us were failing in our responsibility under the UN charter to maximize security and minimize suffering. Russian and French intransigence no doubt gave great comfort to the Iraqi government in its campaign to resist cooperation with the Security Council. I have little hesitation in saying this: Iraqi diplomats would tell me so, as they crowed that sanctions were crumbling and it was we, the UK and the US, who were isolated in the world, not them. Meanwhile, I have equally little doubt that, for our part, although we may not have had legal responsibility for the welfare of the Iraqi people, we had a moral responsibility. We should have done a lot more a lot sooner to reduce the unquestionably harmful effects of sanctions. It would be too easy to blame this on the Americans, and indeed they were even less inclined to ease sanctions than the British were, but we could have done more, a lot more. There were good alternatives, which were never properly pursued.[19]

Another form of analysis would see this as a story of bad group dynamics, with young to middle-aged people, mostly men, arguing and not listening, refusing to accord to one another even the possibility that they might be right. And indeed there was something ugly going on in that group. Petty rivalries and animosities were allowed to influence debate on a much larger issue. To my shame I remember the pleasure I felt at my little triumphs, such as when the UK draft resolution became the only draft under discussion and the rival French draft fell away, irrelevant and defeated like a vanquished knight (not for nothing is the entrance to the British ambassador’s residence in New York lined with prints of Waterloo). We would whine to our ambassador when the French had been particularly rude, and, like a good Dad, he would ring up the French ambassador to admonish him. It was more than a little childish.

But there was something else going on too, something that my account may have made clear to the reader but did not become clear to me until long after I left the mission. We believed that we were dealing with real facts and real people. We had a positive belief in information. Our information was good; our opponents’ was biased. And of course they believed the opposite. One of us must have been wrong.

If, instead of playing music, we could have transported ourselves to the ward of a children’s hospital in Saddam city, a slum of Baghdad, or to a school; if we could have spent six months in Iraq instead of six months in negotiation, then things might have been different. I suspect — I do not know, and never will — that our arguments would have subsided and we would have sought instead to find practical ways to do something. My colleagues and I spent many hours dreaming up schemes to try to improve conditions in Iraq (history will not long remember the “cash component”, a scheme to allow the UN to fund projects with direct cash locally, rather than having to import all goods through the Oil-for-Food program). None of them came to anything. When we proposed them, they were blocked. When our opponents advocated similar ideas, we were truculent. We once proposed a visit by a team of “objective” UN-appointed experts (real experts this time, not the diplomats): although we managed to get the Council to agree the initiative, the Iraqi government refused to allow them in. I even applied to visit myself in order to see with my own eyes (one’s own eyes of course being entirely reliable witnesses of the “truth”): the Iraqi government denied my visa application. Absent any encounter with reality, we worked in a futile abstraction.

Of course all information, whoever mediates it, is something less than what it is describing. No amount of statistics can convey the bottomless agony of the loss of a child. No words, especially the dry vocabulary of official reports, can capture what suffering is. It is a long way between New York and Baghdad. Whenever information made the journey, something was lost en route. It would have taken a huge leap of imagination sitting in a stuffy room on the banks of the East River to think about the real needs of Iraqi people: not in dollars and tons, but in human, emotional terms. Occasionally I tried, but it was too uncomfortable and unpleasant. I could not, for example, bring myself to watch John Pilger’s film until long after I left the job. I didn’t want to know what was happening there: it was easier to dismiss Pilger as a polemicist and carry on with our own version of reality.

One thing about this debate is now clear to me. We chose the “facts” to suit the policy, and not the other way around. Had we been confronted with the unarguable truth of actual experience, we would not have found it so easy to do this. It was not only the junior diplomats in New York who were busy creating our own versions of what was “really” happening, it was the entire government. While we were arguing in New York, London would encourage us on. Together we would read the same reports from the UN in order to find in them even more egregious examples of Iraqi malfeasance, the more easily to argue our case that it was “all the Iraqi government’s fault”. Indeed there was plenty of such evidence. I clearly remember, dismal though the memory is, skim-reading dense and poorly-written UN reports, looking for the key sentences (“There has yet to be sufficient cooperation from the Iraqi government in implementing this aspect of the program”) to highlight in our telegrams back to London and then deploy like hand grenades in the negotiations. These sentences would stand out to me as if in bold type while the more nuanced information would fade almost literally into nothingness; and they became mini-factoids that would assume a life of their own, replayed first in our telegrams, then picked out by a desk officer in London for a ministerial press conference. If the minister remembered this factoid, he might use it in other interviews, and round and round it went.

This is not a problem that was unique to the arguments over Iraqi sanctions. It is common to all foreign policy and, despite the explosion of “information” in today’s e-world, it seems to be getting worse. For the greater the amount of information, the greater the need for simplifying narratives to “explain” what is going on.

All information, however comprehensive it attempts to be, inevitably embodies a selection and reduction from reality. No one sees with the eyes of god. In the mass of available information, inevitable selections have to be made about what to use in order to decide policy. In the British foreign service, there is an all-too-human tendency to seek out and relay the information that confirms our view of the world. And the further away one is from reality, the worse the tendency is. We were 6,000 miles from the Iraqi reality we were arbitrating; there were times when we might as well have been talking about the surface of the moon.

There is a belief in government that we, the policymakers, sit at the apex of a pyramid of information. No one in government is silly enough to believe that they know everything, but they have great faith that as the information about reality at the base of the pyramid is passed upward, only its unnecessary elements are filtered away, leaving only the essential “facts” for those at the summit on which to base their decisions. Civil service culture in Britain reifies the skill of taking large quantities of information and reducing it to the key essentials (the testing of this skill is a central part of the entrance examinations). From what I have seen of Germany and the US (two foreign services which I know better than others), other government services value this skill too. And it is easy to see why. The world is a complicated place. There is far too much information about everything. Decision-makers cannot possibly absorb all the information available, so they rely on reductions performed by those lower down the pyramid. But, as this episode illustrates, sometimes at least, what is essential may not be what is presented to the decision-maker; and indeed it may be the very thing that is left out. What was essential about decisions about sanctions on Iraq? I would argue that at least part of what was essential was the condition of the Iraqi people: their reality. And that reality played very little part in our deliberations. We talked about it; we even claimed to care about it (remember the phrase which must have tripped across ministerial tongues a thousand times, “We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people”?). We thought we were talking about facts, or at least representations of facts, but they were the wrong ones.

Although we were wrong, we were confident in our wrongness. There were many others telling us we were wrong, but we ignored them. UN staff members, NGOs, ordinary Iraqis (including those who opposed Saddam) would tell us that sanctions were causing considerable suffering. But our assigned roles as diplomats gave us the confidence, some would say arrogance, to dismiss their concerns. They were suspect, politicized, motivated by sentiment or politics, whereas our motives rested on the elevated plane of diplomacy; if these motives were not pure, they were nonetheless the right ones for this discourse: we had “our” security, the region’s security, even the world’s security at heart.

Our physical location made such insouciance easier. It was very difficult for lobbyists or activists to know who we were. If they managed to identify us, it was harder still for them to meet us. We could simply refuse, leaving demonstrators to yell on the streets outside, far below our offices many stories in the air. Our negotiations took place in small rooms deep inside the UN complex, inaccessible to all except those delegations allowed to attend. The press and outsiders could not get near. Since 9/11 the fencing and the security checks around these bastions of diplomacy have only become thicker.

If dissenters ever did manage to meet us, we could easily dismiss their arguments. Even if misguided, we were highly versed in the facts and nuances of the sanctions debate. Steeped in the reports, arguments and counter-arguments, we could easily outmaneuver the earnest campaigners who came to present an alternative view, one perhaps more closely aligned to “reality”.

The lesson is clear. Like the world, policy is complicated. At all times, the suffering of others should be given due heed, even priority above all other requirements. Policy-making does not benefit from secrecy or privacy. Karl Popper told us this many decades ago, but we have not yet learned his lesson. Information is not reliable, unless it is constantly reexamined, checked and tested against reality. Others, particularly those most affected by policy, must be allowed to participate, or at least to be heard.