"No one wants to acknowledge the amount of nonmilitary damage, the destruction of cold food
and medicine storage, the power supply," Halliday says. "I went there to administer the largest
humanitarian challenge in U.N. history. I didn't realize our level of complicity in the suffering."
According to preliminary numbers in a study conducted by Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist
at Columbia University and a specialist on the health effects of the embargo, the death rate for
Iraqi children age 5 and under has spiraled up, nearly tripling since sanctions were imposed in
1990. At that time, child deaths in Iraq were on a par with much of the Western world.
"There is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under 5 years old in the
modern world," Garfield says. "When the U.S. hit a bomb shelter in the Gulf War, it admitted a
grave mistake and changed its rules . . . yet these sanctions are resulting in about 150 excess
child deaths per day."
U.S. officials usually dismiss such talk of American responsibility as so much agitprop. They say
that Iraq is a conspirator in its own decline. And they add that the country is now allowed to
pump enough oil to stave off the worst suffering. Under the oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell
$5.2 billion worth and use some of that money to buy food, medicines and limited medical
technology.
That allows Iraq to buy about one-third of the food and medicine it purchased before the war,
according to Halliday.
Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright went on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1996 and assayed
a defense of the toll taken by sanctions.
A reporter stated that some estimates placed child deaths in Iraq at half a million (Halliday uses
the same figure), and asked if the price was worth it. "I think this is a very hard choice," she
replied, "but the price -- we think is worth it."
More recently, Albright returned to "60 Minutes" as secretary of state and advised reporters
that "you can't lay that guilt trip on me. . . . I believe that Saddam Hussein is the one who is
responsible for the tragedy of the Iraqi people."
Halliday wades warily into this moral calculus of blame. He is not inclined to defend Saddam
Hussein and senior Baath Party officials, and he acknowledges problems in the distribution of
food and medicine. And Iraqi officials have, on occasion, insisted on ordering sophisticated
medical machinery when wiser people would zero in on basic medicines and foodstuffs. There
are a few streets in downtown Baghdad, he concedes, that seem strikingly cosmopolitan, full of
well-fed shoppers.
That, however, is but to concede the obvious: In all tragedies, even more so in authoritarian
nations, the poorest and most rural suffer worst. What's more to the point, say two other U.N.
inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that even the best-run sanctions program
could not deliver enough food and medicine to ameliorate all the suffering.
Halliday seizes on that point, extends it. Let's suppose that sanctions have contributed, through
poor nutrition, stunting and dysentery, to but 100,000 deaths.
"I've been to hospitals where they have enough heart medicine for two patients and there are 10
who need it. How do you count that? How do you spread it?"
He leans across the table toward a visitor. He uses a word he has hitherto danced around.
"These are criminal calculations."
He refused to talk about them at first, the four leukemia kids. It seemed one of those maudlin
stories the press favors, Dickensian puff pastry that will only encourage those who favor a more
punitive policy to dismiss Halliday as a "damn bunny-hugger."
He relents, finally, and tells of his visit to the Saddam Hussein Medical Center in Baghdad.
Once a modern hospital, it's now filled with dust, baking in the heat of an infernal summer. The
air conditioning rarely works. He found four children there, three girls and a boy, gravely ill with
leukemia.
There was not enough medicine for all of them. So he broke his first rule in Iraq: He searched
for medicines on the black market, traveling by car on the hot dusty track to Amman, Jordan.
He describes his next steps in a clipped, weary monotone.
"I walked back into the hospital. . . . We went to the ward, we had picked up some presents
for Christmas. We found that two of the children were already dead."
He didn't go to hospitals much after that. He had no solutions. And he "didn't want to be one
more foreigner gawking with no answers."
He recounts this in his sun-filled apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. He is 57, with
bred-in-the-bone reserve. He was an assistant secretary general at the United Nations. It's
considered bad form to publicly rebuke a member nation.
"I used to lecture my staff about such things." He chuckles at himself. "Now I talk a lot about
ends justifying means."
The leukemia incident wasn't the only time he bent the rules. Frustrated at the rising death toll in
late 1997, worried that the United Nations lacked the will to stand up to the United States, he
took the highly unusual step of lobbying France, Russia and China to relax sanctions. And one
long night in Baghdad, he typed and retyped an uncharacteristically passionate letter to his boss,
Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"I wrote a very nasty letter, probably too nasty," he says. "I said that we were managing a
process that was resulting in thousands of deaths. I told him you have to stand up and speak."
The letter fed a growing sense that he needed to leave. But he refused. His staff needed a
leader, and enough could be done in the margins of sanctions policy to save thousands of lives.
Since his departure he's traveled a lot -- on his own dime, he says -- to New Zealand, Iceland
and all over Europe. He was invited even to Great Britain to sit on a government-sponsored
panel and criticize that nation's policy toward Iraq. He has refused to return to Iraq, though,
even when invited by Saddam Hussein. He doesn't want to appear sympathetic to the regime.
In this country, he's found himself appearing mainly on talk radio shows and college campuses.
The establishment press and Congress paid far greater attention to the resignation of a different
U.N. official: UNSCOM arms inspector Scott Ritter.
Ritter's narrative of Iraqi deception and the apparent willingness of the Clinton administration to
look the other way resonated in a nation that has lived with the unfinished business of Saddam
Hussein and Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. Ritter, the war hero, has come to function as
sort of a doppelganger, his outsize personality and tougher prescriptions overshadowing
Halliday's.
"You can't match Ritter. He's a hero, he's got a great message to sell," Halliday says. "I play as
just some jaded U.N. official. I can't match his sex appeal."
The jokes conceal a tension that ran through relations between the humanitarian staff and the
arms inspectors in Iraq. The arms inspectors are convinced, based on voluminous documents
and intelligence sources, that Iraq still harbors at least the raw stuff of weapons of mass
destruction: poison gas, biological weapons, perhaps worse.
It's a history best paid notice: Saddam Hussein has used some of these weapons on his own
people.
But Halliday says he found it nearly impossible to get the arms inspectors to work with his staff,
and to persuade them to allow some technology into the country, to repair energy and water
systems.
"I would drive home through raw sewage, watching children all but bathe in it," Halliday says.
"But they wouldn't meet with us. They seemed worried we'd convert their cowboys into
bunny-huggers."
His doubts about the UNSCOM mission run deeper. It's a dangerous world, in which
companies and nations across the so-called civilized world hawk the most murderous weapons,
legally and illegally. To insist on staying inside Iraq until every weapon is destroyed seems a
fool's errand, he says.
"The inspectors destroyed tons and tons of arms and that was great," he says. "But they need a
timetable."
Nor is getting rid of Saddam Hussein necessarily the answer, he argues. The dictator's son, for
one, is far worse, he believes. As are the many thousands of young Iraqis who have no access
to Western thought and education, and who increasingly believe that Saddam Hussein is too
moderate.
"Beware what you ask for," Halliday says. "Killing Saddam does not necessarily solve
anything."
Some American officials argue that there is an exile movement with hooks deep into Iraq, and
that a carefully coordinated guerrilla movement could establish power someday.
Weeks after that interview, Halliday called again. He's worried that the United States appears
intent on war, he's flying to Washington to hold a few meetings. Hours later, he's in Washington.
The civil servant's reserve is slowly falling away. He confesses he's getting radicalized, that he
feels the need to speak more deeply, more passionately. Of late, he's taken to asking American
audiences if they could survive on some beans, some rice, a little yogurt and impure water.
"I feel somewhat guilty for abandoning my colleagues in Iraq during this talk of bombing," he
said a week ago. "Now I see the American generals talking about possibly 10,000 more Iraqi
deaths. This is not a strategy, it's simply to the point of madness.
"One day, we'll all be called to account and clobbered in the history books."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
and medicine storage, the power supply," Halliday says. "I went there to administer the largest
humanitarian challenge in U.N. history. I didn't realize our level of complicity in the suffering."
According to preliminary numbers in a study conducted by Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist
at Columbia University and a specialist on the health effects of the embargo, the death rate for
Iraqi children age 5 and under has spiraled up, nearly tripling since sanctions were imposed in
1990. At that time, child deaths in Iraq were on a par with much of the Western world.
"There is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under 5 years old in the
modern world," Garfield says. "When the U.S. hit a bomb shelter in the Gulf War, it admitted a
grave mistake and changed its rules . . . yet these sanctions are resulting in about 150 excess
child deaths per day."
U.S. officials usually dismiss such talk of American responsibility as so much agitprop. They say
that Iraq is a conspirator in its own decline. And they add that the country is now allowed to
pump enough oil to stave off the worst suffering. Under the oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell
$5.2 billion worth and use some of that money to buy food, medicines and limited medical
technology.
That allows Iraq to buy about one-third of the food and medicine it purchased before the war,
according to Halliday.
Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright went on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1996 and assayed
a defense of the toll taken by sanctions.
A reporter stated that some estimates placed child deaths in Iraq at half a million (Halliday uses
the same figure), and asked if the price was worth it. "I think this is a very hard choice," she
replied, "but the price -- we think is worth it."
More recently, Albright returned to "60 Minutes" as secretary of state and advised reporters
that "you can't lay that guilt trip on me. . . . I believe that Saddam Hussein is the one who is
responsible for the tragedy of the Iraqi people."
Halliday wades warily into this moral calculus of blame. He is not inclined to defend Saddam
Hussein and senior Baath Party officials, and he acknowledges problems in the distribution of
food and medicine. And Iraqi officials have, on occasion, insisted on ordering sophisticated
medical machinery when wiser people would zero in on basic medicines and foodstuffs. There
are a few streets in downtown Baghdad, he concedes, that seem strikingly cosmopolitan, full of
well-fed shoppers.
That, however, is but to concede the obvious: In all tragedies, even more so in authoritarian
nations, the poorest and most rural suffer worst. What's more to the point, say two other U.N.
inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that even the best-run sanctions program
could not deliver enough food and medicine to ameliorate all the suffering.
Halliday seizes on that point, extends it. Let's suppose that sanctions have contributed, through
poor nutrition, stunting and dysentery, to but 100,000 deaths.
"I've been to hospitals where they have enough heart medicine for two patients and there are 10
who need it. How do you count that? How do you spread it?"
He leans across the table toward a visitor. He uses a word he has hitherto danced around.
"These are criminal calculations."
He refused to talk about them at first, the four leukemia kids. It seemed one of those maudlin
stories the press favors, Dickensian puff pastry that will only encourage those who favor a more
punitive policy to dismiss Halliday as a "damn bunny-hugger."
He relents, finally, and tells of his visit to the Saddam Hussein Medical Center in Baghdad.
Once a modern hospital, it's now filled with dust, baking in the heat of an infernal summer. The
air conditioning rarely works. He found four children there, three girls and a boy, gravely ill with
leukemia.
There was not enough medicine for all of them. So he broke his first rule in Iraq: He searched
for medicines on the black market, traveling by car on the hot dusty track to Amman, Jordan.
He describes his next steps in a clipped, weary monotone.
"I walked back into the hospital. . . . We went to the ward, we had picked up some presents
for Christmas. We found that two of the children were already dead."
He didn't go to hospitals much after that. He had no solutions. And he "didn't want to be one
more foreigner gawking with no answers."
He recounts this in his sun-filled apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. He is 57, with
bred-in-the-bone reserve. He was an assistant secretary general at the United Nations. It's
considered bad form to publicly rebuke a member nation.
"I used to lecture my staff about such things." He chuckles at himself. "Now I talk a lot about
ends justifying means."
The leukemia incident wasn't the only time he bent the rules. Frustrated at the rising death toll in
late 1997, worried that the United Nations lacked the will to stand up to the United States, he
took the highly unusual step of lobbying France, Russia and China to relax sanctions. And one
long night in Baghdad, he typed and retyped an uncharacteristically passionate letter to his boss,
Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"I wrote a very nasty letter, probably too nasty," he says. "I said that we were managing a
process that was resulting in thousands of deaths. I told him you have to stand up and speak."
The letter fed a growing sense that he needed to leave. But he refused. His staff needed a
leader, and enough could be done in the margins of sanctions policy to save thousands of lives.
Since his departure he's traveled a lot -- on his own dime, he says -- to New Zealand, Iceland
and all over Europe. He was invited even to Great Britain to sit on a government-sponsored
panel and criticize that nation's policy toward Iraq. He has refused to return to Iraq, though,
even when invited by Saddam Hussein. He doesn't want to appear sympathetic to the regime.
In this country, he's found himself appearing mainly on talk radio shows and college campuses.
The establishment press and Congress paid far greater attention to the resignation of a different
U.N. official: UNSCOM arms inspector Scott Ritter.
Ritter's narrative of Iraqi deception and the apparent willingness of the Clinton administration to
look the other way resonated in a nation that has lived with the unfinished business of Saddam
Hussein and Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. Ritter, the war hero, has come to function as
sort of a doppelganger, his outsize personality and tougher prescriptions overshadowing
Halliday's.
"You can't match Ritter. He's a hero, he's got a great message to sell," Halliday says. "I play as
just some jaded U.N. official. I can't match his sex appeal."
The jokes conceal a tension that ran through relations between the humanitarian staff and the
arms inspectors in Iraq. The arms inspectors are convinced, based on voluminous documents
and intelligence sources, that Iraq still harbors at least the raw stuff of weapons of mass
destruction: poison gas, biological weapons, perhaps worse.
It's a history best paid notice: Saddam Hussein has used some of these weapons on his own
people.
But Halliday says he found it nearly impossible to get the arms inspectors to work with his staff,
and to persuade them to allow some technology into the country, to repair energy and water
systems.
"I would drive home through raw sewage, watching children all but bathe in it," Halliday says.
"But they wouldn't meet with us. They seemed worried we'd convert their cowboys into
bunny-huggers."
His doubts about the UNSCOM mission run deeper. It's a dangerous world, in which
companies and nations across the so-called civilized world hawk the most murderous weapons,
legally and illegally. To insist on staying inside Iraq until every weapon is destroyed seems a
fool's errand, he says.
"The inspectors destroyed tons and tons of arms and that was great," he says. "But they need a
timetable."
Nor is getting rid of Saddam Hussein necessarily the answer, he argues. The dictator's son, for
one, is far worse, he believes. As are the many thousands of young Iraqis who have no access
to Western thought and education, and who increasingly believe that Saddam Hussein is too
moderate.
"Beware what you ask for," Halliday says. "Killing Saddam does not necessarily solve
anything."
Some American officials argue that there is an exile movement with hooks deep into Iraq, and
that a carefully coordinated guerrilla movement could establish power someday.
Weeks after that interview, Halliday called again. He's worried that the United States appears
intent on war, he's flying to Washington to hold a few meetings. Hours later, he's in Washington.
The civil servant's reserve is slowly falling away. He confesses he's getting radicalized, that he
feels the need to speak more deeply, more passionately. Of late, he's taken to asking American
audiences if they could survive on some beans, some rice, a little yogurt and impure water.
"I feel somewhat guilty for abandoning my colleagues in Iraq during this talk of bombing," he
said a week ago. "Now I see the American generals talking about possibly 10,000 more Iraqi
deaths. This is not a strategy, it's simply to the point of madness.
"One day, we'll all be called to account and clobbered in the history books."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
