The Consequences of Kofi Annan
Despite everything, James Traub admires the U.N.
 
By Niall Stanage 
November 8, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009212


James Traub likes the United Nations. We know this because he tells us so, on the first page of The Best Intentions. By the last page, a single question hangs in the air. Why? 
But first, the good news: The Best Intentions, largely focused on Kofi Annan's decade-long tenure as the U.N.'s secretary-general, is engaging, nuanced and often fascinating. This is no small achievement for a book about an institution so wasteful and corrupt that it tends to attract intense interest mostly from its detractors. The Best Intentions is proof that the phrase U.N. page-turner is not hopelessly oxymoronic. 
The problem at the heart of the book, then, lies not with any shortfall in Mr. Traub's literary talent. Rather, it is with the facts that he presents: They simply do not seem to justify his enthusiasm for the institution or its most recent leader. (Mr. Annan is slated to step down on Dec. 31.) 
There is an abundance of evidence that the U.N. is teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy. Under Mr. Annan's direction, it has often proved to be a weak force, or a nonexistent one, in the most benighted parts of the world. Its finances are awash in red ink. Its now-defunct Commission on Human Rights included representatives from thuggish regimes in Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe. The commission's successor, the Human Rights Council, is not much better. And the supposedly benevolent Oil for Food program, under which Saddam Hussein's Iraq was to be allowed to use oil revenues for humanitarian purposes, turned out to be a fiasco, involving inside deals, bribery and kickbacks. 
Mr. Traub is too intellectually honest to ignore these shortcomings. Yet he seems to admire Mr. Annan and to believe in the institution, whatever its failings. At the least, the U.N. offers Mr. Traub a captivating story to tell. He weaves his tale from two threads: the U.N.'s engagement (or shameful lack thereof) in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and Darfur; and the goings-on back in New York as Mr. Annan grapples with geopolitical crises and scandals of the U.N.'s own making. 
The book has much of interest to say about both subjects. Mr. Traub drills deeply into the arguments over how the U.N. should respond to each regional conflict. Those arguments were themselves rooted in the world body's history, which has been marked by sharp expansions and retrenchments in the scale of its ambitions. As Mr. Traub notes, the U.N. charter was hailed by no less a personage than John Foster Dulles as a greater Magna Carta. The Cold War soon put paid to such optimism. Mr. Traub details the organization's irrelevance to both the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and notes that, during this era, the Security Council and the secretary-general subsisted on second- or third-order conflicts. The fall of the Iron Curtain and, shortly after, the Security Council's authorization of the first Gulf War seemed to promise a wider role. Then came the Balkans and Rwanda--and inaction. 
In the wake of those catastrophes, Mr. Annan sought to expand the grounds for intervention, arguing that sovereignty was not sacrosanct. State frontiers should no longer be seen as a watertight protection for war criminals or mass murderers, he stated in a 1998 speech that Mr. Traub discusses extensively. 
Mr. Traub offers more than pure geopolitics, however. We discover that Mr. Annan was on the brink of resignation as the Oil for Food allegations swirled. His voice had gone, and his skin had gone matte, the way it did at the very worst moments, Mr. Traub writes. The author's affection is palpable. To his eyes, the secretary-general and his wife, Nane, projected a kind of moral glamour. Mr. Traub describes a dinner party in spring 1997 at which Mr. Annan asked each table to discuss intervention and to nominate a speaker to sum up its thoughts. Mr. Traub notes that Annan himself said little and that this was his way: He marinated himself in the thoughts of people more verbal and philosophical than he. He opines that the trip that Mr. Annan made to Baghdad in 1998 to resolve an impasse over weapons inspections had imparted a heroic glow to this gentle soul. 
But Mr. Annan often seems far from heroic. Each time the issue of personal culpability is raised, Mr. Annan slithers behind bureaucratic language. Regarding Oil for Food, Mr. Annan moans about the Security Council's creation of a messy structure that allowed room for abuse; asked about the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica--supposedly a U.N. safe area in Bosnia--he blames unidentified commanders on the ground; questioned by Mr. Traub about Rwanda, he says--astonishingly--only that we should have used the media more aggressively, and exposed the situation for them to see. Of course, at the time this organization was media-shy. The buck evidently never stops with Kofi Annan. Nor, of course, does it stop with anyone else at Turtle Bay, a flaw that goes to the core of the U.N.'s recent travails. 
The organization, Mr. Traub suggests at his book's conclusion, is imperfect but also the best we can do. It fails to live up to the highest expectations because, by its nature, it cannot countermand the political imperatives of its most powerful members--or of the powerful bloc formed by developing countries whose interests are often antithetical to those of the U.S. 
But this pragmatic, if forlorn, assessment is not the dominant one in The Best Intentions. Most of the time Mr. Traub seems wedded to the notion that the U.N. should be judged less by its record than by its ideals and aspirations--to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, as the preamble of the U.N. charter puts it, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights. 
In a telling passage of The Best Intentions, Mr. Traub paraphrases the views of Mark Malloch Brown, the current deputy secretary-general, regarding a particular U.N. agency. Mr. Malloch Brown is said to believe that the agency is, like so much at the U.N., noble rather than actually effective. The impression lingers that Mr. Traub is himself a little too enchanted by the U.N.'s protestations of its own nobility. Rather like the secretary-general, he would have done well to bring a sterner outlook to his task. 
Mr. Stanage writes for the New York Observer. You can buy The Best Intentions from the OpinionJournal bookstore.