Backstabbing for Beginners : My Crash Course in International Diplomacy

From the corridors of the UN to the palaces of Baghdad, an unprecedented, first person coming of age account of the oil for food scandal that rocked the UN. Michael Soussan was a young, idealistic diplomat when he landed his dream job as a Program Coordinator at the UN's Oil for Food Program, the largest humanitarian operation in the organization's history. His mission would be to provide relief to Iraq's civilian population, struggling to survive in a country under economic sanctions. But Soussan soon realised that all was not as it seemed as he struggled to work within the UN's Byzantine organizational structure and the programme's schizophrenic mandate. His boss was both paranoid and incomprehensible, his colleague was widely assumed to be a spy, and the international community treated the humanitarian program like a petty cash box.From this unique vantage point, Soussan became the first insider to call for an independent investigation of the United Nations' dealings with Saddam Hussein via a "Wall Street Journal" editorial. This led to the appointment of the Volker Commission by Kofi Annan, and a resulting investigation rocked the United Nations to its very foundations and led to multiple prosecutions in numerous countries, some of which are still ongoing. As Soussan writes, 'the story is bigger than the scandal. For ultimately, what made this episode in recent history possible, was not so much the lies we told each other, but the lies we told ourselves. If all of us cared about the people of Iraq as much as we professed, then this story can only be described as a conspiracy of saints'. "Backstabbing for Beginners" is an insider's view of a corruptible international system and a stinging indictment of the countries and individuals who exploited the misfortune of the people of Iraq.