The New Republic

On September 12, just after addressing the United Nations, George W.
Bush lunched with Kofi Annan. According to U.N. custom, such
occasions begin with a toast from the highest-ranking delegate from
the host nation, and expectations for Bush's preprandial remarks
weren't high. That morning Annan had delivered his own speech to
the General Assembly, in which he slammed Bush's unilateralism and
made it clear he wouldn't be the administration's yes- man on Iraq.
("I stand before you today as a multilateralist by precedent, by
principle, by charter, and by duty.") A copy of his speech had
leaked a day early to The New York Times, provoking Bush aides to
privately complain about Annan's "showboating." But when Bush rose,
one U.N. official recounts, "I nearly spit out my water." The
president praised the secretary-general to the hilt. "He
essentially called Annan an indispensable leader," says the
official. "It was a gushing, gushing homage."But five days later Annan disappointed the Bush team again. On
September 16, Saddam Hussein penned a letter accepting "inspections
without conditions"-- dramatically undercutting America's push for
a new Security Council resolution. Documents obtained by the State
Department showed that the letter was co- authored by Annan, who
had conspired with the Iraqis to throw a wrench into America's
plans. In a conference call that Monday night, Condoleezza Rice and
Colin Powell chewed the secretary-general out. Annan, one state
department official told me angrily, "went behind our backs."

This is the ongoing theme of the Bush administration's relationship
to Annan: It acts as if Annan were a member of the Cabinet. ("My
man Kofi," is Powell's pet phrase.) And in many ways Annan is
America's ideal secretary- general. He has championed
globalization, mowed the U.N. bureaucracy, and chided African
governments for playing the colonialism card to divert attention
from their own incompetence. So when Annan reverts to conventional
U.N. secretary-general behavior--pushing peaceful resolutions to
crises, no matter the costs; worrying about impositions on state
sovereignty; adhering to a stickler's strict constructionist
interpretation of U.N. resolutions--he catches the Bush
administration off guard. "It's mystifying, and perhaps arrogant,
that [the administration] never sees it coming," says David Malone
of the International Peace Academy, an occasional Annan adviser.
Unfortunately, Annan reverts to conventional U.N. secretary-general
behavior at the worst possible moments. In the face of genocide and
dictators, he loses his nerve. That's why he bailed out Saddam last
month and why he may still be the Iraqi tyrant's best hope for
survival. The mystery, in short, isn't why Annan acts the way he
does; it's why the Bush administration expects anything more from
him.

Annan may be the greatest secretary-general since Dag Hammarskjld
died in a 1961 plane crash. But then, it's not hard to look good
compared with Nazi Kurt Waldheim or such invisible men as Javier
Perez de Cuellar and U Thant. And Annan has benefited enormously
from following Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros- Ghali. Pompous
and imperious, Boutros-Ghali liked to brag that he disciplined his
staff with "stealth and sudden violence." And he felt no compunction
about applying the same technique to high-ranking diplomats. In
1995 he accused Madeline Albright, then-U.N. Ambassador, of
"vulgarite" in front of the Security Council after she hectored him
over the failures of U.N. peacekeeping in Eastern Slavonia. Or, to
take the most notorious example of his undiplomatic style: At a
1992 press conference in Sarajevo, with sniper fire and exploding
artillery shells in the background, Boutros-Ghali told the besieged
Bosnians, "You have a situation that is better than ten other
places in the world. ... I can give you a list."

In the United States, Boutros-Ghali's arrogance had turned him into
a political liability. Bob Dole mocked his name on the stump for
laughs. Pat Buchanan warned that the Clintonites had ceded American
sovereignty to a world government. In 1996, to defuse the issue,
the Clinton administration adopted Annan as their replacement. In
contrast to Boutros-Ghali's crass anti- colonialism, the native
Ghanaian spoke affectionately about the United States, even
ruminating about retiring here. Just as Jesse Helms had demanded,
Annan ran on a platform of "reforming" the U.N.'s vast, absurdly
bloated bureaucracy. And in a break with the knee-jerk
Israel-bashing that had become so much a part of U.N. culture,
Annan spoke of his "Israeli friends." In fact, he boasted a premier
philo-Semitic credential: marriage to Raoul Wallenberg's niece.

Annan's aides claim there's another reason he's a great
secretary-general. "He's developed a new theory for the institution
that places the human being at the center of the United Nations,"
says Shahsi Tharoor, one of his two closest advisers. At a glance,
it seems banal rhetoric. But it actually represents a massive shift
in U.N. doctrine. The organization's 1945 charter wasn't written to
protect human rights and individual liberties; it was designed to
promote the interests of states. The doctrine most invoked in the
U.N.'s chambers was "state sovereignty." But as Annan pointed out
in a 1999 speech to the Human Rights Commission, governments
usually asserted state sovereignty to justify repression within
their own borders. In the speech, which followed the Security
Council's failure to endorse NATO air strikes in Kosovo, Annan
promised that human rights would finally "take precedence over
concerns of state sovereignty. " Annan envisioned a liberal
interventionist United Nations. He argued that "given the means--in
Kosovo and in Sierra Leone, in East Timor and Angola--we have a
real opportunity to break the cycles of violence once and for all."
According to Robert Orr, one of U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's
chief deputies, "Within the United Nations, it was nothing short of
a revolution."

Unfortunately, it was a bold doctrine espoused by a cautious man.
During a 30-year career in the U.N. bureaucracy--head of human
resources, director of the budget, administrative officer for the
Economic Commission for Africa, chief of personnel for the High
Commission for Refugees--Annan developed an organization man's
phobia of risk. The tension first became clear during his tenure as
chief of U.N. peacekeeping, from 1993 to 1996. On his watch the
U.N. bungled its response to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. To
take the sorriest episode from the Bosnian escapade: In 1993, in
the town of Srebrenica, U.N. peacekeepers negotiated a cease-fire
with Bosnian Serbs in exchange for the disarmament of the town's
Muslims. The United Nations promised the Muslims that they didn't
need the weapons because the U.N. would protect them in a "safe
area." Two years later, 600 Dutch peacekeepers guarded the Muslims
residing in the eastern Bosnian U.N. "safe area." But when the
Bosnian Serbs mounted their July 1995 assault on Srebrenica, the
U.N. betrayed its promise of security. By all accounts, Annan's
office in New York sent muddled commands to the field. As a result,
the Dutch fired not a single shot; they gave the Muslims the
misimpression that they would be protected by NATO air strikes, and,
as Serb General Ratko Mladic rounded up Muslim men, the
peacekeepers stood aside. In the end, by the best estimates, the
Serbs killed an estimated 7,414 Muslim men from the town.

But it's Rwanda that provides the clearest window into Annan's mind.
Four months before the Hutus embarked on their 1994 genocidal
rampage--800,000 Tutsis killed in 100 days--Annan's office in New
York received a fax from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the
U.N. contingent in Rwanda. The memo, labeled "most immediate,"
quoted from a well-placed informant who described in eerily precise
terms the planning of the Hutu "anti-Tutsi extermination." Dallaire
asked for permission to evacuate the source. He also announced that
in the next 36 hours he would raid a "major weapons cache" that had
been stockpiled in preparation for the genocide. Annan denied both
requests. His office cabled Dallaire, "[T]he overriding
consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action
that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated
repercussions." What's worse, he ordered Dallaire to inform Rwanda's
Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana of the informant, even though
the informant had explicitly named the president's cronies as the
planners of the genocide. At these key moments in Bosnia and
Rwanda, Annan showed his fundamental timidity by his insistence
that U.N. troops adhere to the strict letter of Security Council
mandate--even if it meant sacrificing lives--and by his refusal to
treat either the Hutus or Serbs as forces of evil rather than
negotiating partners.

These failures didn't derail Annan's career. In fact, they largely
did the opposite. Because he didn't resign in anger or make a fuss
about U.N. inaction, he cemented his reputation as innocuous. He
failed upward. And then he repeated his mistakes. During the Kosovo
crisis of 1999, Annan couldn't (or wouldn't) take the lead in
organizing a multinational force to stop the Serb offensive. While
he clearly hinted that he personally agreed with NATO's air strikes,
he publicly criticized them in a 1999 speech at The Hague: "Unless
the Security Council is restored to its pre-eminent position as the
sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a
dangerous path to anarchy." And in Sierra Leone the following year,
he sent in another peacekeeping corps doomed to repeat the mistakes
of Bosnia. Undermanned, under-armed, and without a broad mandate,
the peacekeepers were less than ineffective. They'd entered with
the goal of keeping the peace between the government and Foday
Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), even though the only
real solution was to destroy Sankoh's band of murderers. "To be
neutral here is to be an accomplice in crime," Michael Ingatieff
wrote in The New York Times. Soon the 500 Zambian and Indian
peacekeepers sent by Annan were taken hostage by the RUF. It
created the perfect image of U.N. ineptitude. And once again, the
secretary-general expressed his deep remorse for a failed
operation.

When the United Nations released its report on Srebrenica in the
fall of 1999, an anonymous official made explicit the report's
implicit conclusion to The New York Times: "Through error,
misjudgment and the inability to recognize the scope of evil
confronting us we failed to do our part to save the people of
Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder. These failings
were in part rooted in a philosophy of neutrality and nonviolence
wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia." Presumably, the United
Nations publicly flogged itself so it would never again act like a
neutral arbiter in a morally unambiguous situation and would no
longer cut doomed deals with duplicitous tyrants. Taken seriously,
this lesson would suggest a rather tough line against a leader who
launches unprovoked attacks on his neighbors, gasses his citizens,
and flaunts U.N. resolutions. And, for a time, it looked like Annan
supported a tough approach to Saddam. In 1997 he appointed Richard
Butler, a brusque Australian diplomat, to head the team of
inspectors monitoring Saddam's post-Gulf war disarmament, the
United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). But as Butler came into
office, and Europeans increasingly complained about the horrors of
sanctions, the Iraqis sensed the United Nations might be susceptible
to its gamesmanship. So they worked to undermine public opinion
about UNSCOM. (Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and other
Saddam surrogates dismissed the inspectors as roughneck "cowboys"
and American spies.) The Iraqis hoped these complaints would force
the United Nations to send in a new, more sympathetic set of
inspectors who would declare Iraq disarmed, thus ending the
sanctions regime.

As Butler describes in his 2000 memoir, The Greatest Threat, Annan
usually played along with Iraq's antics. "The leadership of the
U.N. had become a facilitator of Iraqi concealment," Butler writes.
Or more precisely, Annan so deeply desired a peaceful resolution to
the Iraq crisis that he downplayed Saddam's evasions. There are
many small examples. When Butler tried to obtain access to
presidential palaces, the Iraqis demanded that the United Nations
send cartographers and produce new maps of the contested sites--an
obvious stalling tactic. Nevertheless, Annan obliged the Iraqi
request. When Aziz complained about the presence of American
inspectors in UNSCOM, Annan suggested to Butler that he consider
pulling them from the team. When Butler asserted to The New York
Times editorial board that Iraqi missiles could "blow away Tel
Aviv," a statement of fact echoed by Butler's predecessors, Annan
privately chastised him for being "inappropriate." And every time
Butler objected that these concessions to the Iraqis might hurt the
cause of disarmament, Butler writes, "Annan and his senior staff
would try to marginalize them. These `details' were considered
unnecessarily complex for what was perceived as a pure diplomatic
project."

In February 1998, as the Clinton administration clamored to punish
Saddam's intransigence with air strikes, Annan traveled to Baghdad.
It was his "sacred duty," he announced upon arriving on French
President Jacques Chirac's jet, to negotiate a solution. Annan
cited passages from the U.N. charter obliging him to work for
peace. But he seemed to confuse this obligation with the U.N.'s
obligation to disarm Iraq. On his trip he stopped placing U.N.
demands on Iraq and began acceding to Iraqi ones. In response to
Saddam's qualms about presidential sites, Annan proposed a less
rigorous technique for searching the Iraqi dictators' palaces and
homes--"white glove inspections," he called them. A separate group
from UNSCOM would look at these potential weapons factories
accompanied by "senior diplomats." In other words, he tacitly
endorsed Iraq's complaints against the UNSCOM "cowboys." A far more
striking concession, however, came in the final paragraph of the
Memorandum of Understanding signed by Annan and Saddam. It reads:
"The lifting of sanctions is obviously of paramount importance to
the people and Government of Iraq and the Secretary- General
undertook to bring this matter to the full attention of members of
the Security Council." Annan had, in effect, granted the argument
to Saddam. It was sanctions, not Saddam's manipulations, that
caused the Iraqi people to suffer. Now, Annan had signed up to
advocate Saddam's position to the world.

Upon returning to New York, Annan pronounced his trip a smashing
success. "[He's] a man I can do business with," he said of Saddam
at a press conference in Turtle Bay. He told confidants that his
diplomatic approach had triumphed over Washington's militancy.
"They should not encourage me to be a Rambo-- because I can never
be a Rambo," he explained to the journalist William Shawcross. He
truly believed that he'd made a personal connection with Saddam.
But it soon became clear that the connection was entirely illusory.
As Annan departed Baghdad, Aziz sent a letter unilaterally making
important amendments to the Memorandum of Understanding, such as
insisting that "state documents shall not be subjected to the
verification in question." Within nine months the UNSCOM inspectors
had been thoroughly stymied, blocked from any meaningful searches.
But even then Annan didn't back American strikes against Saddam.
When Operation Desert Fox commenced in December 1998, he announced,
"This is a sad day for the United Nations and for the world. It is
also a very sad day for me."

At the height of his 1998 visit to Baghdad, Annan received a 2 a.m.
call from an enraged Madeline Albright. She couldn't believe the
concessions she'd heard that Annan had made to the Iraqis. As her
tirade worked toward its crescendo, Annan interrupted, "You're
presuming on our friendship." He slammed down the phone. But the
Clintonites had good reason to presume. Before Albright had begun
to campaign for him, Annan had been a long-shot secretary-general
candidate at best. Once Annan got the job, he and Albright together
softened up U.N. scourge Jesse Helms, so that in 1999 the Senate
approved contributing to the organization's coffers after years of
shirking. And even though the Iraq crisis soured Albright and her
staff on Annan, it didn't affect the administration's relationship
as a whole. Richard Holbrooke especially became a booster of Annan,
dining with him in private and praising him in public. Besides, it
was never entirely clear that Bill Clinton himself resented Annan's
February 1998 intercessions, which prevented him from having to
strike Iraq at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, letting
him put off an attack until December--a far less politically
volatile moment. As John Ruggie, one of Annan's top deputies,
argued in The Nation, "President Clinton saw in the U.N. a useful
tool to avoid or limit U.S. engagement abroad that might pose
domestic political risks and a handy scapegoat when those efforts
failed."

Far stranger is that the hawkish Bush administration has grown so
close to Annan. And it's largely Powell's doing. The two men trace
their friendship to the Gulf war, when Annan helped negotiate the
release of 900 U.N. employees held in Iraq. They also share an
interest in African aids. According to State Department officials,
Powell has built up Annan's reputation for reliability within the
administration. But it wasn't until September 11 that the Bushies
saw Annan's real value--as someone who could take on the Afghan
nation-building responsibilities that the Bush team didn't want. In
the weeks after the attack, Bush finally convinced the House
Republicans to pay $582 million in arrears. Annan has since become
a regular presence at the White House, where Bush has declared, he
possesses a "good heart." "[Annan is] a class act, as we say in the
state of Texas," Bush announced at a New York reception last month.

Which helps explain why, despite having been burned by Annan so
recently, the State Department seems poised to repeat the mistake.
After Powell and Rice slammed him in the September 17 conference
call, one U.S. official pointed me to the headline of a Los Angeles
Times article: "ANNAN BOWS OUT OF THE TUG OF WAR BETWEEN THE U.S.
AND IRAQ." Another official told me, "I think Powell and [U.N.
Ambassador John] Negroponte aren't worried about his doing more
damage. He's out of the picture for now." But Annan advisers say
that if the State Department believes this, the United States is
mistakenly presuming on his friendship once again. With or without
a new U.N. resolution, inspectors will return to Iraq. Inevitably,
Saddam will thwart their work and the crisis will build. At that
point, Annan's advisers say, he might try another last-ditch effort
at preventing war. And if the United States and Britain strike
without the Security Council's blessing, he will bemoan the
violation of international law. "It's his constitutional obligation
to promote peace," says Tharoor.

If the Bushies want to truly understand Annan, they should read
Shawcross's book Deliver Us From Evil. Even though Shawcross
intended to produce a hagiography of the secretary-general, he
couldn't help but convey some telling details. Just as Butler
described, Shawcross shows that Annan has never had his heart in
the anti-Saddam crusade, being much more concerned with ending
sanctions and keeping the peace. ("He has a totally different view
of Iraq from the United States," says A. Peter Burgleigh, who
served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the 1998
crisis.) When Annan traveled to Baghdad in February 1998, he joined
Saddam in the Republican Presidential Palace to smoke Cuban cigars.
Annan, according to the Shawcross account, showered Saddam with
flattery. As Shawcross later recounted the conversation, Annan told
Saddam, "You're a builder. You built modern Iraq. It was destroyed
once. You've rebuilt it. Do you want to destroy it again?" During
the conversation, Saddam took notes on a yellow pad and never
looked Annan in the eyes. When Saddam didn't respond, Annan
escalated the flattery. "You've taken some courageous decisions,"
he continued. Too bad the same cannot be said of Annan more often.

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