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Fall/Winter 2006
The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power.
By James Traub
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2006), 464 pages.
Reviewed by François Clemenceau
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At last, a readable book about the contemporary
United Nations. Author James
Traub is a writer with a gift for teaching,
and in his book, The Best Intentions, he lays
out the workings and often-hidden maneuvering
that characterize operations at
the UN – the global flagship of multilateralism.
His book illuminates what goes on
inside the bureaucracy and the vast, complex
General Secretariat that is opaque to
the public and even to the media beyond
the circle of reporters accredited to the
UN. That situation makes the Secretariat
an easy target for smears by critics.
The book also tries to explain the realities
of the General Assembly – with its
grand rituals and often-unreadable and
incomprehensible documents – and also
of the UN’s specialized agencies devoted
to development and humanitarian work.
These are the great – and sometimes just
grandiloquent – causes of our era, and
there can be no doubt about the noble
intentions of the UN’s founders in the
wake of World War II. But ossifying bureaucratic
methods, the role of national
quotas in personnel staffing and the inertia
of top-heavy leadership have left a
widespread impression that the UN is
something between a Boy Scout and a
civil servant paralyzed by red tape.
Traub makes a convincing case that
Annan has enhanced the UN’s global
stature in a particularly turbulent period.
The author seems to have been initially
attracted to his subject by concern
about the oil-for-food scandal and then
gradually been drawn into reporting on
questions of whether the scandal was manipulated
against the UN. Undoubtedly,
he shared the general sense of outrage
about the scandal. Beyond the views of
individuals – Americans or Europeans,
pro- or anti-UN, pro- or anti-Kofi – people
smelt dirty business in this transaction
riddled with hypocritical compromise.
But then, as Traub convincingly recounts
it, these suspicions and insinuations were
orchestrated and amplified into accusations
and character assassination against
Annan. The episode seems to have disgusted
Traub, who devotes a score of
pages in chapters 15 and 19 to laying out
what he suspects were sordid maneuvers
against Annan. Although he does not say
so outright, Traub conveys the view that
many of the attacks on Annan were really
a campaign of retaliation in the U.S. for
the degree of independence he had established
for himself during his tenure at the
UN. And he suggests the scandal was also
aimed at the UN itself: obviously a flawed
organization, it has a single overriding defect
in its detractors’ view – its refusal to
take orders from the great powers and
their blocs.
The ambiguity in this bout of UN
controversy has often been linked to
questions about the personality of Annan
himself. Is he soft-spoken or simply soft?
Patient or slow? Courageous or clumsy?
All these different facets of the man are
described by Traub as he retraces Annan’s
two mandates at the UN helm.
It is ironic that Annan and the U.S.
should have ended up with such tense relations.
He was the preferred U.S. candidate
to succeed Boutros Boutros-Ghali
when the Clinton administration decided
to dump the Secretary-General, the former
Egyptian foreign minister, by refusing
to back him for a second term. At the
time head of UN peacekeeping, Annan, a
Ghanaian, grandson of tribal chiefs, had
spent almost his entire career at the UN
and was thoroughly familiar with the
UN’s assets and weaknesses. Traub recounts
how Annan, once in the top job,
used that knowledge and his new authority
to give the UN a higher profile – and
carry himself to global eminence.
As the story unfolds, Traub seems to
become increasingly impressed by Annan.
But his generally admiring account does
not blind Traub to some of Annan’s flaws
that marred his performance and destiny
as the UN leader. He probes Annan’s apparent
slowness to counter-attack against
the barrage of allegations when the oil-for food
scandal broke. As Traub tells it,
Annan was hoping for help from American
friends, so he was relieved to finally
get advice and support from Richard Holbrooke,
the Clinton administration’s former
UN ambassador. With this help,
Annan rebounded. The inquiry headed by
Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal
Reserve, eventually cleared Annan of
corruption. But Traub notes that Annan’s
initial paralysis, verging on personal depression,
was damagingly prolonged.
Traub gives a blow by blow account
of how the oil-for-food story unfolded
and gradually took on bigger dimensions.
Was there a concerted effort by the UN’s
foes to inflate the scandal and use it to
destroy Annan and devastate the UN he
had helped shape? Was there a real plot
afoot? Or did we simply witness a wave
of displeasure against the glass-walled
UN headquarters on the bank of the East
River? Traub claims that an Annan confidant discreetly sounded out the Bush administration
on the question and was
told “you won’t find our fingerprints on
this one.” That ambiguous reply says a lot
about the mood of revenge in the White
House and the State Department toward
Annan, the man who called the war in
Iraq illegal, who wrote a letter warning
against the U.S. attack in Fallujah, and
whose deputy for humanitarian operations
derided the U.S. offer of $15 million
for Asian tsunami victims as “a tip.”
A recurrent theme in the book is the
frustrated mutual confrontation of Annan
and the nations that initially supported
him. On the one hand, the Bush administration
resented Annan because he refused
to be a simple accomplice of U.S.
policy. On the other, Annan was alienated
by what he felt was a lack of support for
him in the Security Council – obviously,
from the United States, but also, he told
Traub, from its two European permanent
members, Britain and France.
In the showdown on Iraq, President
Bush’s team, including Colin Powell and
Condelezza Rice, felt at odds with the UN
position and its logic. This turned into
personal animosity against Annan and his
advisers, who were accused of failing to
understand U.S. reasoning. The situation
provided an opening for the neo-conservatives
– who were powerfully positioned
in the White House and the Pentagon – to
act on their view that the organization
was simply outmoded in the post-September
11 era, that it could not adapt to
function in tandem with U.S. military
power and therefore was no longer a good
investment for Washington.
The first sign of this U.S. frustration
was the appointment of John Bolton as
US ambassador to the UN (as the successor
there to John Negroponte).
Traub’s few pages on Bolton make lively
reading as he recounts characteristic
episodes in his career and the evolution
of his views. These had consequences
when Bolton got to New York. His tough
approach nearly derailed the package of
UN reforms backed by Annan. An international
“wise men’s group” had been
provided a report on how to change the
UN so it could respond better to new
threats and generate more fairness and
more democracy. A compromise package
had been worked out by Annan and
the head of the General Assembly, Jean
Ping from Ivory Coast. By balancing demands
for more development and calls
for great promotion of democracy, it had
gained consensus backing.
At that point, Bolton arrived and
wanted to start over from the beginning
– five weeks from the General Assembly’s
opening session in September 2005
that was supposed to adopt the new program.
Traub provides a comic but depressing
account of Bolton’s futile crusade
to put his stamp on the reform by
insisting on revisiting each and every article
in an effort to add a new touch so
that they bore the hallmark “made in
USA.” Reform proposals have still not
been adopted that match the initial
hopes of handing the secretary general’s
office greater power to oversee management
– responsibilities still largely in the
hands of the unwieldy 191-state General
Assembly, where developing nations fear
losing their influence. Committees on
ethics and on human rights remain short
of some earlier expectations.
His tactics were apparently not approved
in advance by Secretary of State
Condi Rice, but Bolton’s action had dire
effects. Eventually, Washington watered
down the substance (and the style) of its
demands, but “the Bolton episode” intensified many African member states’
suspicions about U.S. intentions on UN
reform. Again, Traub raises the question
of whether U.S. behavior was misplaced
zeal by inexperienced individuals or deliberate
sabotage.
Traub makes much of Bolton’s failure
to unseat Mohammed El Baradei, Director-
General of the Vienna-based International
Atomic Energy Agency. Bolton,
who had headed U.S. efforts to prevent
nuclear proliferation, resented the UN official for his skepticism about the existence
of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. But official U.S. hostility failed to
prevent El Baradei from winning a second
term as IEAE head and then winning
the Nobel Peace Prize – a direct slap at
Bolton and his fellow neo-cons.
Equally illustrative is the painstaking
political work by Lakdar Brahimi, the
UN special envoy who helped pick the
first Iraqi members of the interim government,
the starting point for Iraqi
democracy. (Bad relations with Paul Bremer,
the top U.S. representative in Iraq,
was one reason for Brahimi’s resignation
in 2004.) Iraq’s start toward democracy
was a process that the White House constantly
singled out for praise as a success
story – without ever offering a word of
appreciation for the patience, courage
and skill of the UN representative who
did so much to make it happen.
Similarly, Traub manages to mix the
personal dimension into his insider account
of the Darfur tragedy. Readers
quickly understand, from the signs of
nervous tension and moments of doubt,
that this is also a personal test case for
Kofi Annan. Traub is able to bring out
clearly the limits on UN action in crises
of this sort. In a series of gripping paragraphs,
we hear Jean-Marie Guehenno,
the undersecretary for peace operations
(the post that Annan had once held) explain
to the secretary-general and his
team just how few options are open to
the UN and how limited its margin of
maneuver is in Darfur. American demands
(for military intervention) run
counter to French reticence, which is
based on the same reasons that France
refused to get involved in Iraq – the wish
to avoid a cultural and religious clash in
the gird World. The African Union
lacks equipment and resources. Darfur is
one of the most glaring examples of the
inability of international diplomacy to
operate successfully while it remains constrained
by the taboo against violating
national sovereignty. Only if the events
could be labeled “genocide” would there
be an automatic right to invoke Article 7
of the UN Charter, which authorizes the
use of force.
What Traub notes (and other observers
know, too) is how horrible it will
be for Annan if he steps down from his
UN post on December 31 against a backdrop
of deepening tragedy in Darfur – in
effect, a second Rwanda. Both those
crises have very personal dimensions for
Annan. Darfur has echoes of his difficulties
with the United States and the other
P-5 states (as the Security Council’s permanent
five members are known) in
what turned out to be UN impotence
when confronted with the massacres in
Rwanda in 1994. Annan was not then
the UN head but he did hold a key position
as head of peacekeeping, where he
behaved cautiously, exposing himself to
(unjust) accusations of being unwilling
to speak out or of lacking the right temperament
of a man of decisive action in a
crisis. Above all, Traub says, Annan had
seen once again the cowardly behavior
that can affect even powerful nations as
well as nations that are directly exposed
to a tragedy of global dimensions. Beyond
France and the United States, there
were other nations and bodies (including
South Africa, Zaire (now the Republic of
Congo), the Organization of African
Unity, Russia and China as permanent
Security Council members) that turned
a blind eye to genocide in Rwanda as if it
did not matter or as if any attempt to
take significant action would have involved
too many risks in terms of domestic
policy or regional security interests.
So now again with Darfur, when the
tough questions are asked: Who will
supply troops? What reaction can be expected
from neighboring Egypt, which
opposes intervention? What will be the
impact on more fragile neighboring
states, Chad and the Central African Republic,
which France supports and fears
will be exposed to crushing influxes of
refugees? All this must amount to a burden
of worry for Annan these days.
Without trying to draw up a balance
sheet on Annan’s tenure, the book suggests
that his time at the UN has brought
new prominence and irreversible change
to the organization. The internal crisis
sparked by the oil-for-food scandal accelerated
the pace of reform and spread
recognition of the need to modernize the
world body’s management and give it
greater guarantees of integrity. These
moves – spurred by Annan, sometimes
under outside pressure – will leave a
strong mark on the UN.
So where do the U.S. lobbyists for
“reform” want to take the UN? Traub
speculates about the future possibilities.
The status quo, he thinks, is untenable
with a U.S. Congress that is tilted toward
conservative views, regardless of the
exact division on political party lines.
What about the view – “with us or
against us” – that was proclaimed by the
Bush administration and survives, albeit
in a more subdued form, in negotiations
about sanctions on Iran and North
Korea? Traub thinks this approach has
backfired too badly to survive outside
the neo-con movement, which itself is
being marginalized.
What are the chances for some new
approaches? The idea of trying to promote
global leadership by “a concert of
democracies,” to use Anne-Marie Slaughter’s
phrase, interests people as different
as prominent conservative Newt Gringich,
editorialist David Brooks and ex-
Clinton aide James Lindsay. But this approach
based on a “hard core” of the
right countries would raise questions,
starting with: Whose brand of democracy
qualities? Is the touchstone the rule
of law or something else? In other words,
can Russia or China qualify? If they don’t,
would that open the door to international
intervention in Chechnya or Tibet? And
what about African countries that are
moving in the right direction but are hesitant
about some steps that they feel
might imperil their stability and even
their borders? And what about countries
that don’t qualify: will they become pariahs
who are consigned to a new, enlarged
“axis of evil”? This “club” approach is
probably modeled ultimately on the EU’s
pattern of concentric circles: some countries
join the euro and some don’t, some
join the Schengen convention facilitating
border-crossing and others don’t – and
people live with the differences. But it is a
misleading comparison in the sense that
the EU, however variable its geometry,
has a founding principle that requires all
member states to accept the same set of
core values. In practice, a “club of democracies”
would likely grow more like
NATO did, as a list of countries that signify
their political allegiance rather than,
like the EU, a pooling of resources and
political will.
Traub himself does not share any
itch for reform either in the form of
making a clean sweep or as an attempt to
pour new wine into old bottles. Instead,
his excursion into the workings of the
UN has left him convinced that it is an
indispensable institution. Could it and
should it be overhauled so it functions
better and faster? Yes, Traub says, but not
for a few countries’ benefit to the detriment
of everyone else. In other words,
any UN reforms should not be aimed at
mirroring the balance of power but, on
the contrary, guarantee the global survival
of political and cultural pluralism.
The recent show of active U.S. hostility
to majority sentiment in the world
body was bound to reinforce suspicions
in many gird World countries that the
Bush administration would never really
accept an approach – and changes –
based on multilateralism and cultural diversity.
And it did. Most of the resentful
nations belong to the Non-Aligned
Movement or the Group of 77, including
“the usual suspects”: Iran, Indonesia,
Zimbabwe, Cuba, North Korea, Syria
and China. What is new nowadays is
that this anti-US clamor rising from different
places around the planet is voiced
in viscerally hostile terms. Reflecting extremism
or despair, it is a departure in
the last few years from the routine denunciations
that had become the wellhoned
stock in trade of gird World
rhetoric. How can we explain this escalation
in antipathy, this shift to more virulence
in public postures, other than as a
sign that these countries share an impression
of seeing this “supreme court of
appeal” – where nations could speak out
internationally on a basis of equality –
called into question because of the ambitions
of one member state?
Traub does not formulate the issue
exactly in these terms, but a reader
comes away from his book convinced
that this question is eating at him and
that he views the tenure of Kofi Annan
as a time when the triumph of the neo-cons
in Washington have started challenging
the legitimacy of the United Nations,
which the United States did so
much to found in 1945. Nowadays critics
of the UN tend to portray the world
body as a system of derailing progress
and putting the brakes on unilateralist
impulses – in other words, a referee who
tries to rush over in time to prevent two
angry players from starting to slug it out.
Readers of Traub’s book are likely to
come away with a different conclusion
about the UN – to the effect that it has
been loaded with too many restraints
and obligations, too many requirements
for old-fashioned consultations and useless
red tape. These have often resulted in
preventing the UN from acting fast
enough – for example, in Bosnia or
Rwanda. Some people want the UN to be
strengthened by a UN tax so it has
standing forces of its own and much better
access to national intelligence findings. Annan has often countered this
view with an argument of his own,
which Traub repeatedly brings to his
readers’ attention: the UN is a collective
body of 192 nations and makes decisions
on the basis of their wishes. In Annan’s
view, failures by the world body to act
more vigorously must be traced back to
the failure of member states to work out
timely compromises as a basis for action.
When Annan evokes roadblocks affecting
UN decision-making, he has in
mind a range of countries from every
part of the political spectrum, including
China and its inclination to act on a slow
timescale, Russia and its nostalgia for
great-power status, Britain and its longstanding
allegiances, France and its ambitions,
the United States and its claim to
speak for the world (which some see as a
cynical ploy and others view as simply
naïve). That list involves only the five nations
with veto powers in the Security
Council. Annan could name dozens of
other countries that have displayed, at
one time or another, damaging wishes to
play power politics with UN crisis management.
In this fast-moving juncture of history,
France, which attaches great important
to the UN and its place in it, would
be well advised to grasp the extent and
meaning of the changes being rejected
in developments at the world body. In
the past, Paris has too often been ready
to exploit the frustrations of the Third
World as a way of pushing French objections
to U.S. hegemony. Since he came to
office a decade ago, Jacques Chirac has
defended the right side on these issues of
principle, heeding the complaints of developing
countries, setting itself up as
the champion of their views and standing
up for them in the flora of key international
and financial institutions. And
France was right about Iraq, as everybody
can see now. France advocated the
correct approach, had the right analysis
and offered the right predictions about
how things would turn out.
But France’s image, the initial meaning
of its stance, was then blurred and
sometimes tarnished by French behavior
as events unfolded, starting with what
seemed to be readiness in Paris to use
the UN to sabotage U.S. chances for success.
Paris worked to spread the worst
possible interpretation of the intentions
and actions of the United States and
Britain and of their Italian, Spanish and
Portuguese allies. The French acted as
though they believed they had a monopoly
on geopolitical sense and international
generosity. They never lost an opportunity
to insist that France’s historical
experience, right or wrong, outweighed
anyone else’s intuitions about the future,
right or wrong. In this changing international
context, the next president of
France, whoever it is, should see to it
that Paris changes its view of the UN.
Specifically, it is urgent for France to stop
using the UN as a place for posturing,
which is usually aimed at dramatizing
French-U.S. confrontation. Often the
only result is to impede any constructive
response in tragic crises that can only be
remedied by UN cooperation.
Whatever questions may be asked
about the man, “Annan emerges as a
flawed but principled statesman, with a
stature his successors are unlikely to be
able to achieve,” concludes the Traub
book’s reviewer in the U.S. journal, Foreign
Affairs. Even so, it may be no bad
thing that the “after-Kofi era” at the UN
starts under a man with the temperament
of Ban Ki Moon, the South Korean Foreign
Minister who is the incoming secretary-
general. There has been a great deal
of comment to the effect that he lacks
charisma, exudes blandness, is inclined
to compromise and seems disinclined to
seek a demanding agenda. But who can
say? Coming in the wake of Annan’s tumultuous
tenure, the South Korean’s
more passive approach may make time
for wounds to heal before the UN resumes
its more active agenda.
During his first term in the five years
ahead, Ban Ki Moon will face profound
challenges and dangerous ambushes.
None is trickier for him than the North
Korean account, a problem with which
he is intimately familiar because he
knows the region first-hand and has
been involved in the six-party talks and
other negotiations. Failure on this issue
will have a ripple effect on the situation
with Iran and aggravate the dangers
there. The United States could end up
hostage to a triple failure: Iran, Iraq and
the nuclear brinkman, Kim Jong Il.
It would be a grievous mistake to rejoice
in a U.S. failure of this proportion.
Those who want to show up the folly of
some recent American policies cannot
expect to see the world do better in a
vacuum of power. The only solutions
seem to lie with the United Nations,
where competing demands have to be
settled by leaving the doors open to bargaining.
Annan helped keep that possibility
alive with his performance in what
he once called “the most impossible job
in the world.”
François Clemenceau is Washington
correspondent for Europe 1, the French
radio network. He previously covered the
Middle East, and European politics.
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