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October 30, 2005
All Al-Tikriti's Men
Social network analysis can be a powerful tool for discovering and mapping the web of relationships between a group of people. Journalists regularly perform such analysis, as do lawyers -- though they might not call it such -- noting the length of acquaintance between two people, their financial ties, how much time they spend together and so forth. Their targets are usually criminal defendants or public figures. An excerpt from this FoxNews article, of last week, U.N. Procurement Scandal: Ties to Saddam and Al Qaeda provides an example:
Who were the people who owned IHC?and so on and so forth.. . . Corporate board minutes of IHC, obtained by FOX News, had mentioned a “sole shareholder” of IHC. The sole shareholder, according to the June sales documents on IHC, turns out to have been an even more mysterious company called Torno S.A.H. (search), based in the financial haven of Luxembourg. And Torno, in turn, had two major shareholders who approved the sale of Torno’s 100% interest in IHC. One of these shareholders was a Milan-based businessman, Dario Fischer (search), a director of IHC since at least 1996, who at the time of the sale was chairman of the board.
The other shareholder in Torno S.A.H., who gave his proxy to Fischer to approve the sale, was a man named Engelbert Schreiber, Jr. (search) He has been linked, either directly or through father-son family business, to a number of Liechtenstein enterprises affiliated at various times from the 1970s through at least the year 2000 with Ahmed Idris Nasreddin (search), a man designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. and U.N. shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
A naturalized Italian citizen, Nasreddin operated for decades out of Milan and Lugano, Switzerland, both as a businessman and a member of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, some elements of which morphed into Al Qaeda. In 2002, Nasreddin, along with a number of his enterprises, landed on the U.N.’s list of individuals or entities “belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda.” He is now believed to be in Morocco.
The Schreiber father-son connections with Nasreddin are labyrinthine, but they are a subject familiar to trackers of terrorist money . . .
It is rare for an entire network to be exposed at once, for its power relationships to become visible to the naked eye in such detail as to find its members scurrying for cover from enemy networks, the lidless eye of the press, or in the case of dictatorships, the furor of the formerly subjugated. Yet this is what is afoot in the circumstances surrounding the overthrow and trial of Saddam Hussein.
No matter how megalomaniacal the dictator, no regime survives through the action of one man. Within are vassals, chamberlains, and yes-men of the highest proficiency. Outside are those who can be persuaded to look the other way for any number of reasons – or better yet, to defend the regime’s odious acts with all the straight-faced solemnity they can muster.
First, with the invasion of Baghdad came the plunder of Iraqi records, and from that came the investigation into the Oil-for-Food scandal. As investigators continue to pull at those strings, unraveling the legitimacy of the United Nations as they go, Saddam’s trial will become the second revealing of his galaxy of appeasers: in his desire to save himself at all costs, Saddam will deny everything, blame the United States, and finally, implicate as many of his former friends as he can. It will not sit well with the President-for-Life to see his old partners in the international community go untried for their own abetting of his crimes. Right out of the gate, he will put the United States on trial along with him. But when that fails, as it will, he will drag his entire edifice of power down with him.
One wonders what manner of connections may ultimately be found among Saddam’s trading partners in the Oil-for-Food mess, his legal defense team, and the slew of international agencies and organizations that decry his trial as unfair. An overclass of globalati, they will cough quite loudly as the pungent odor of corruption exposed ruins their rarefied air. If they aren’t careful, their ideas, programs, and issues might all be discredited. Following the money is proving thus far to be quite a show: named as facilitors in the Oil-for-Food kickback scheme are a British MP; a French Interior Minister; a French Ambassador to the UN,; a former assistant to the Secretary of State for the Vatican,; Marc Rich, beneficiary of President Clinton’s merciful last-minute pardons; DaimlerChrysler, Siemens, and 2400 other firms and individuals.
But more importantly, than any single two-bit player in his sad human tragedy, when Saddam’s trial reconvenes, the conduct of the state of Iraq and the government of Hussein, founded upon principles of Arab solidarity and nationalism, will be seen by those in the region as never before. For every lofty ideal of pan-Arabism that the Ba’athists espoused, there will be a crime against humanity in the name of serving the twisted id of one man. Such will be the spectacle on display: the edifice of secular Arab civilization itself will be shaken. The press in Europe and the US may blow quickly past the corruption exposed by Volcker, but the memories of those ultimately maligned by the sanctions regime are likely to be much longer . . .
Meanwhile, the other bastion of Ba’athism endures scrutiny of different sorts. For all the wailing about the trial of Saddam not being held under international auspices, the trial of the House of Assad is gaining steam, and is being conducted by the UN itself. With each press conference, each report issued, each arrest of high-ranking members of the regime, Bashar’s legitimacy wavers. Unlike the US invasion of his neighbor, the pressure on Syria seems to build with few abstentions: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even France have all condemned the regime for its alleged assassination of Rafik Hariri, and are sided with the US against Syria.
The outcomes of these collapses are not foregone conclusions. Much ill can come from either. In Syria in particular, no one is sure if Assad is actually in power, and there are few opposition groups available to throw one’s weight behind, whether rhetorically or otherwise.
But regardless of the ultimate outcome, as both of these trials progress, the core of Ba’athism, and pan-Arabism by association, will be challenged as never before in the Arab world. The US is creating a moment wherein democracy might take hold of the imagination of the region, especially when so utterly contrasted to the intellectual vacuity of the uninspiring status quo. The next year, or perhaps even months, might prove to be one of the defining fulcrums of history in the Middle East.
Posted by Chester at October 30, 2005 10:43 PM
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