BOOK OF THE DAY: Joe Humphreysreviews Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International DiplomacyBy Michael Soussan, Nation Books, 318pp, £15.99
NO OFFENCE, but diplomats are a strange bunch. Anyone who has nibbled canapes at an embassy reception will tell you that their world is a murky one, filled with moral ambiguity and subterfuge - and that's only in relation to managing appointments.
Getting "sent to Siberia" is a very vivid - and sometimes literal - threat in the diplomatic corps, which goes some way to explaining why it is populated by so many clever people who are also desperately paranoid. (That can actually be read as a compliment.)
Michael Soussan is an astute observer of diplomatic psychoses and in Backstabbing for Beginnershe creates an entertaining guide to survival in the maddening environment of the United Nations. While his experiences cover a very specific time in that organisation's history, many a mandarin in Iveagh House, Whitehall or Brussels should empathise with his story.
In a chapter entitled "The Rules of the Game", Soussan notes: "Making a decision is a dangerous endeavour. Any bureaucrat making a decision runs the very real risk of violating one of the UN's many nonsensical regulations, or offending some country's political sensitivities, and screwing up his career."
There is similar advice on how to send memos (the key is "cc-ing" them to the right people), and how to understand diplomatic jargon. "If history were written in UN-ese, the battle of Waterloo might be considered a French military success," he writes.
Backstabbing for Beginnersis, however, more than a humorous romp through a world of bureaucrats, spies, do-gooders and crooks (although it is all that). It also gives an insider's account of the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, a recent episode that has seriously damaged the credibility of the UN.
An idealistic young recruit to the organisation, Soussan rose within the ranks to become wing-man to Benon Sevan, the former director of the oil-for-food programme who resigned in disgrace in 2005; he had been accused by UN investigators of having taken bribes from Saddam Hussein's regime, claims he denied. Soussan, who played a role in blowing the whistle on the scandal, describes how the UN - as an institution - turned a blind-eye for years to corruption. The story of how Soussan discovered his own boss was implicated in the affair is told with some poignancy, and regret.
A Danish-born son of well-travelled parents who now works as a consultant and journalist, Soussan is not the most discreet of persons. That won't help him land another job at the UN, but it makes his book all the more entertaining. Sevan, once the UN's Number Two, is depicted as a lovable rogue, something of a cross between Borat and Basil Fawlty, while there are plenty of anecdotes about other "names", including Denis "the Menace" Halliday, the former deputy secretary general who clashed with Sevan over UN policy in Iraq.
Occasionally, Soussan over-dramatises events, and at times the narrative is self-serving. But he raises many pertinent questions about the UN operation in Iraq, like whether officials were lying when they said sanctions were killing 5,000 children a month, and whether the French and Russian governments opposed regime-change partly because they were making so much money through oil-for-food contracts.
One of the most disturbing findings relates to the incompetence of the UN. Good intentions are all too often lost in a haze of misunderstandings and contradictions. "Expecting accountability from the UN system," he writes, "was akin to expecting a blind dog to catch a flying Frisbee." This malaise should be of particular concern to Ireland, given an increasing proportion of our overseas aid budget is given to multilateral agencies, many of them under the UN umbrella.
Ending on a hopeful note, he says it is easy to become dismissive of the UN and cynical of diplomacy. "And yet I could not afford to become cynical about this journey. If anything, I had seen where cynicism led people."
Joe Humphreys is an Irish Timesjournalist, formerly based in South Africa, and author of Foul Play: What's Wrong with Sport