history are doomed to repeat it,” Kocian said. “Would you like me to go on?”
“Sorry,” Castillo said.
“It was not a total victory,” Kocian resumed. “President Bush the First decided he did not need to occupy Baghdad to win the war. Ten years later, President Bush the Second decided that it would take American flags flying over Saddam Hussein’s castles to win that war.
“At the end of the first Iraqi war, to make Saddam Hussein live up to what he promised to do at the armistice, and of course did not do, the Americans got the UN to place an embargo on the sale of Iraqi oil. That meant Iraq would have no money from the sale of their oil.
“France and Russia primarily, with some other nations, were suddenly deeply concerned with the helpless women and children of Iraq. Without some income to buy food, the French and the Russians cried, Iraqi babies would starve. Without medicine and medical supplies for Iraqi hospitals, Iraqi women and the elderly would die in agony.
“Oil for Food was born. Iraq would be permitted to sell enough of its oil to buy food and medicine. The United Nations would monitor the sale of the oil, and ensure that nothing entered Iraq that wasn’t food or medicine.
“United Nations inspectors were stationed—primarily at Basra on the Persian Gulf . . . down there . . . and in other places—to count the barrels of oil—the allocations—that would be shipped out for sale, and to make sure that nothing was shipped into Iraq that wasn’t supposed to be.”
Kocian examined the two buckets Kranz had fetched for him.
He dipped the larger bucket in the pool and hauled it out.
“This is how much oil it would take to buy food and medicine. You will notice that when I took it out, it did not noticeably lower the level of the water in the pool.”
He leaned forward, took his cigar from the ashtray, relit it, puffed on it, examined the coal, took another puff, and went on.
“Saddam found himself sitting on—swimming in?—a sea of black stuff that was worthless to him, but considered black gold by the rest of the world. All he had to do was figure some way to get it out of Iraq, past the wall the UN had set up.”
He tapped the tiled coping.
“First, he tried diplomacy. He would get the UN to relax or remove the embargo. To do this, he would have to have important friends in the UN. How does one acquire friends? Give them something. He arranged to have the oil allocations assigned to people he thought might become his friends. Many of these were French and Russians, but there were others, too.
“To keep this simple, what he did was arrange—by bribing a UN official—for his oil allocations to come into the hands of these people at prices lower than the going price for crude oil. Say, fifty cents a barrel lower. Fifty cents a barrel becomes a lot of money when one is dealing in terms of, say, two million barrels of oil—one tanker full of oil.
“All these people had to do to turn a quick profit of a million dollars was sign over their allocation of two million barrels of oil-for-food oil to someone else. Saddam also let it be known that if he were permitted to export more oil, there would be more millions—many more millions—of dollars coming into the hands of those who caused the UN to relax the embargo.
“He also made friends by not complaining when the medicine shipped into Iraq for the poor Iraqi children and women had a high price. Aspirin at five dollars a pill, for example. Flour at twenty dollars a kilo. Und so weiter.
“Now to do this, of course, he had to have friends among the UN officials who were checking to see that he didn’t get anything he wasn’t supposed to have. How to make these friends? Give them something. What did he have to give? This black stuff that was worthless to him anyway. How was he going to get it to them? Bribe the UN official checking the outgoing oil. If he happened to be looking the other way when, say, a hundred thousand barrels of oil was mistakenly pumped into a tanker hauling off the legitimate oil-for-food allocation, he could expect to have party or parties unknown drop off a package of crisp brand-new U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills at his grandmother’s apartment.”
He picked up the water bucket and poured from