Kofi Annan as tragic hero: his UN legacy.

• Author: Clemenceau, Francois
• Position: The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power - Book review

The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power. By James Traub Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2006), 464 pages.

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 ]awed 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 in]ate 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...