text:
From a distance, Kofi Annan's gray hair and goatee cast a hazy nimbus around his face, and his features appear as if in soft focus. At closer range, it is an easy face to look at, in no way extraordinary, and this is its advantage: it does not appear to be hiding anything, and at the same time it gives nothing away. The rest of him is of a piece, a model of equanimity. (Recently, when I asked about Annan's plans, one of his aides said, "We're trying to read his body language. That means we have no idea.") Annan is a slight man—five feet nine, and trim—with perfect posture and an unflappable air of amiable gravity. His impeccable tailoring, stately bearing, and elegant, expressive hands suggest a personal fastidiousness, even preciousness. He is, in fact, an aristocrat—in Ghana, where he was born and raised, his father was a traditional chief of the Fante people; through his mother, he is heir to the paramount chieftancy of the Akwamu. His wife, Nane Annan, is also of proud pedigree, a niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the martyred Swedish rescuer of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Like many complex people, Annan likes to describe himself as a simple man. He says he prefers to live life modestly and enjoys nothing so much as a hike in the country. He loves to dance, and he does so with the sort of undemonstrative panache that draws one's attention as if by seeking to deflect it—through finesse and understatement, expressing warmth while manifesting cool. He is at once intensely present and personable and curiously detached. Annan was born a twin, and when I asked him about that, he said, "Yes, I had a twin, but she died about eight years ago. We were close, yah." A colleague who has worked with Annan for years expressed astonishment at this: "I've never heard him say he was close to anyone before."
Annan has spent four decades working in the U.N. bureaucracy, and before he became Secretary-General, six years ago—the first black African, and the first career U.N. man to hold the office—he and his wife lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, in the East River; now they look out on the river from their official residence, a grand brownstone on Sutton Place, the former mansion of J. P. Morgan's daughter, and they have become fixtures of New York society. Annan has appeared as a special guest on "Sesame Street," seeking to resolve a conflict between shag-carpeted puppets, and a double-page photo of the Annans embracing ran in the "Couples Issue" of Vogue in February. "There is a little bit of an element of a royal couple around them," Mark Malloch Brown, an Englishman who runs the U.N. Development Program and has counted the Annans as friends for nearly twenty years, told me. Malloch Brown used to work as an international political consultant, advising heads of state. "My guys slogged through the trenches, and by the time they got to be national leaders they had put their reputations on the line, they had lived through campaigns, they were battle-hardened veterans. But royals sort of get there effortlessly, by accident of birth. Although Kofi and Nane came up through the ranks, they have a more gracious, divine-right-of-kings feel about them than the other Secretary-Generals I've known."
In the mid-nineties, Annan served as head of the U.N. Peacekeeping department for nearly four years, during which he oversaw the grim withdrawal of the U.N.'s force from Somalia, and the catastrophic failures of its missions in Bosnia and Rwanda. Nonetheless, he professes continued astonishment at the existence of evil. Since his elevation to Secretary-General in 1997, he has been charged by the U.N. Charter with looking after "the maintenance of international peace and security," and while that goal remains elusive, he exudes an uncanny sense of being at peace in himself. After all, as he never tires of pointing out, he has no practical political power. He controls no territory; he commands no troops; he cannot make or enforce laws; he cannot levy taxes; he exercises no administrative authority outside the U.N. bureaucracy, and he hasn't even got a vote in its General Assembly or on the Security Council. The Secretary-General, he says, is "invested only with the power that a united Security Council may wish to bestow, and the moral authority entrusted to him by the Charter"—or, put more plainly, he has nothing but his voice.
Annan's voice is a low, husky hush, like an amplified whisper, and there is an uncanny metronomic evenness to his speech. He sounds ancient, and yet the voice is full of vigor, a monotone without tedium, inflected only by the equatorial mid-Atlantic lilt of his accent—as much West Indian, to an American ear, as West African—which lends it a muted musical cadence. The effect is disconcertingly soothing. Annan can make the vaguest, most innocuous statements sound substantial and profound, and he can deliver his toughest, most challenging arguments without apparent argumentativeness. When he speaks, one-on-one or from a dais studded with microphones, he clearly feels himself to be speaking to the world, but he creates the impression of a man listening to himself, confirming that he agrees with himself as he goes, and allowing one to eavesdrop. In the complete absence of any discernible attitude in the quietly rumbling deadpan of his oratory, one is left with nothing to respond to but his words.
The overriding theme of Annan's frequent public speeches is that the troubles of the world in our time—war, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, aids, refugees and economic migration, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and all other manner of woe and mischief that humanity is heir to—are more than ever "problems without borders," and must be dealt with as such, internationally, lest we reap a whirlwind of Hobbesian mayhem. To anyone with a pessimistic view of history, the notion that our salvation depends on everyone's coming together for the common good may sound like a forecast of doom. But Annan, who counts himself as a pragmatist, believes in the possibility of world order. Reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, he heard a wakeup call for his cause. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire," he said in Oslo, on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize—awarded jointly to Annan and to the U.N.—in December of that year. "If, today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible." To illustrate his point, Annan evoked an image from chaos theory: "Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the Butterfly Effect. Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own Butterfly Effect—for better or for worse."
A year later, when I visited him in his office at the northeast corner of the thirty-eighth floor—the top floor, of course—of U.N. headquarters, Annan allowed that of late the human storms have been for the worse. His office is a spacious room, wood-panelled, with a large, surprisingly clean desk (no computer). One wall of the room is almost entirely glass, giving way to a vast and mesmerizing panorama across the East River of the roofscape and highway overpasses of Queens. It is a comfortable aerie; a pleasantly defiant memory of Cuban cigar smoke hung in the air. "The world is really a big mess," Annan said as we settled into his sitting area. "Wherever you turn you have problems." Iraq was obviously the most pressing issue for the U.N., but Annan seemed as concerned by the ravages of poverty, disease, ignorance, and misrule. "We have the global economic downturn, and of course you have the terrorist threats and the terrorist networks, which are spread very far," he said. "Even without these things, I always maintain that we have a serious crisis of governance. To govern in this atmosphere and take optimal and rational decisions, trying to deal with the hot issues while containing the others, is a really difficult thing. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I don't know where else a major crisis is going to come from, where it's going to break."
Annan didn't sound alarmed; his voice was as mellifluous as ever. He is, above all, an optimist, and he spoke with something of a weatherman's confidence that even the most devastating tempests will pass. He is a master of talking politics without politicizing, naming names, or apportioning blame. This is partly standard diplomatic discretion and partly a taste for subtlety that is peculiarly suited to the ambiguities of his office. The U.N. is composed of a hundred and ninety-one sovereign governments. These member states, as they're called, are Annan's employers, and, as his double-barrelled title indicates, his job is to serve them as the U.N.'s secretary, its chief administrative officer, and also as its general, its chief political operative. Together the member states form the General Assembly, which convenes in full each fall. The Assembly rides herd over the U.N.'s administrative functions, sets its internal agenda, and can also pass resolutions, which may have political influence but have no standing as law and no power of enforcement. For that, there is the Security Council, the U.N.'s political organ, which has only fifteen seats, ten allotted by an arcane political arithmetic to member states elected for two-year stints, and the remainder occupied since 1945 by five permanent members, known in-house as the P-5—China, England, France, Russia, and the United States—who alone enjoy the supreme power of the veto, and thereby dominate the Council's debates and decisions.
The Security Council's resolutions have the authority of international law, and the Secretary-General is supposed to see that they are carried out. In addition, Annan is endowed with an independent political capacity, described vaguely in the Charter by a single sentence: "The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security." In other words, he is expected to tell his bosses what he thinks they should be thinking about. But, at the same time, the Charter states that he must "not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization." So Annan must be independent—not neutral, exactly, for he must exercise judgment—serving all states while being beholden to none, interpreting the rules of the game as the world's hybrid coach and referee.
Such unaligned evenhandedness is made unusually tricky because of the Council's limited membership and the concentration of its political powers in just a few hands. The U.N. is hardly the universally representative body of "international community" it purports to be. And if the P-5 rule the roost, America is the cock of the walk. In that, at least, the U.N. is truly a microcosm of global reality, and America's predominance has been the defining feature of Annan's tenure. "The rest of the world is trying to live in the shadow of the U.S., and they come to him and hope he will explain the U.S. to them, and hope he will explain them to the U.S.," Nader Mousavizadeh, a close aide to Annan, told me. When Annan took office, with the blessings of the Clinton Administration after it unceremoniously killed the reëlection bid of his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, there was much grumbling in the international press that he was Washington's poodle. That is no longer the view. "He appears to be everybody's Secretary-General," Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., said, although he was quick to add that it would be folly for Annan to ignore America's clout.
Annan's most important diplomatic mission as Secretary-General may well have been his first, which took him to Capitol Hill in 1997, where—in exchange for a promise, since fulfilled, to streamline and consolidate the U.N. bureaucracy—he persuaded Jesse Helms to release nearly a billion dollars of America's U.N. dues that had been held back for years. "The United Nations needs the United States to achieve our goals, and I believe the United States needs the United Nations no less," Annan has said. But, even when it pays its way, Washington does not always feel the need of the U.N. so keenly. With its distrust of what Thomas Jefferson—in his first inaugural address, two hundred years ago—called "entangling alliances," the United States has always taken a selective approach to international coöperation, which puts Annan in a delicate position. "We need to be careful, and the U.S. also needs to be careful," he told me, adding, "One may not be happy with the U.N. today, or the Council today, because one is not getting one's way. But tomorrow one is going to need that organization." Yet, there was little the U.N. could do but cringe when the Bush Administration repudiated the Kyoto agreements on global environmental standards and withdrew from the newly established International Criminal Court. After September 11, 2001, the United States turned to the Security Council for support for the war in Afghanistan, but Washington's selective approach to multilateralism created resentment abroad, even among long-standing allies.
Throughout the summer of 2002, Bush ratcheted up the threat of invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein, alone or in a lonely coalition with England. He began challenging the American preference for deterrence and containment of foreign threats in favor of preëmptive action, and he argued that, since there were already more than a dozen valid Security Council resolutions on the books demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm, no further U.N. authority was needed. Such American unilateralism was hardly a recent, Republican innovation. "Three times Clinton did what many of the Democrats are now saying Bush can't do," Richard Holbrooke, who served as U.N. Ambassador during Clinton's second term, reminded me recently. "He did it in Bosnia in '95, in Iraq with Desert Fox in December of '98, and in Kosovo in '99. In the two Balkan cases he had no Security Council authority," Holbrooke said, adding: "In the case of Iraq, December '98, the U.N. was starting its meetings when they got the word that the bombing had begun, and Clinton simply said, 'Well, I'm bombing under U.N. authority because Iraq's in material breach.' " Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, American and British warplanes have been bombing military targets in and around the "no-fly" zones in Iraq, and although these actions have no U.N. mandate, they have been tolerated by the Security Council.
But now Bush was talking about conquering Iraq, and virtually every other country in the Assembly opposed the idea. Even within the Administration, and among prominent voices in the Republican foreign-policy establishment, there was increasingly open disapproval of moving against Iraq unilaterally, or at all, and opinion polls showed that the American people, too, wanted the U.N. involved. By Labor Day, Bush had taken to saying that war could wait, but this was hardly a great concession, considering that it would take nearly six months to mobilize and position the forces necessary for the proposed attack.
On September 12th, Bush addressed the opening session of the General Assembly, and nobody in the hall that day knew what he would say. By convention, Annan spoke first. In recognition of the drama of the occasion, he had given the White House copies of the text of his speech the day before, and, in a break with protocol, advance copies were also made available to the press to insure that Annan's remarks were not completely eclipsed by those of Bush. "Choosing to follow or reject the multilateral path must not be a simple matter of political convenience," Annan said, and he invoked the example of the U.N.-mandated Gulf War as a reminder that "when states decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations." He made it clear that multilateralism does not simply mean doing America's bidding: "The existence of an effective international security system depends on the Council's authority, and therefore on the Council having the political will to act even in the most difficult cases, when agreement seems elusive at the outset." He used the word "multilateral" nine times in the course of his speech, before mentioning Iraq by name, and when he did he steered a delicate middle course between pleasing the Assembly's antiwar constituency by describing the resumption of weapons inspections as "the indispensable first step" to resolving the crisis, and acknowledging Washington's underlying view of where the blame for the standoff lay: "I urge Iraq to comply with its obligations for the sake of its own people and for the sake of world order. If Iraq's defiance continues, the Security Council must face its responsibilities."
Annan's speech was a hit, but Bush stole its thunder. "We created the United Nations Security Council, so that—unlike the League of Nations—our deliberations would be more than talk, and our resolutions would be more than wishes," he said, and that swift mention of the League—the U.N.'s disgraced predecessor, which dissolved into oblivion on the eve of the Second World War, after failing to respond to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia—cut to the quick. The trouble with Iraq, Bush said, was not an American beef but a clash between Saddam's regime and the U.N. He recited the demands of past resolutions on Iraq, and quoted from the U.N.'s own reports to show how they had been systematically violated.
"All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment," Bush said. "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" It was Saddam who was subverting the organization through unilateral action, he explained, and he proposed that the Security Council pass a new resolution, demanding immediate and unconditional compliance with all previous resolutions, and making the alternative clear: that "a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." The choice, Bush said, was between fear and progress, and he ended as he had begun, in a spirit that was equal parts challenge and invitation: "We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. Delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well."
The Assembly responded with tremendous relief that Bush hadn't simply written them off. Shashi Tharoor, a longtime deputy to Annan who is now Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, said that the President had "come out very much smelling like roses." Annan's take was, characteristically, more reserved. He agreed that the current Iraq crisis represented "a crucial moment for the organization," but he did not care for the suggestion that the U.N. might go the way of the League of Nations. "I think that was overstating the case," he said to me. What most impressed him about Bush's performance was the response in the General Assembly: "Every speaker who got up and spoke after the President said Iraq has to coöperate, Iraq must disarm."
The United States had never threatened regime change so convincingly, but Annan had heard tough talk about Iraq before. In February of 1998, during a similar crisis, he had taken it upon himself to go to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam directly. U.N. weapons inspectors had been in Iraq for nearly seven years then, a period marked by significant early successes in finding and dismantling Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal, and at least an equal degree of frustration at the hands of deceitful and obstructionist Iraqi officials. But they had reached a deadlock with the regime. At issue were eight sprawling complexes to which the Iraqis forbade access, declaring that they were "presidential sites." According to the resolutions that mandated the inspections, this was a meaningless objection: inspectors were to go wherever they chose, whenever they felt like it. The United States responded to the impasse by threatening to bomb Saddam into submission, a prospect France and Russia angrily opposed. When Annan got word from Yasir Arafat that Saddam might be willing to negotiate, he let it be known that he was on his way. Madeleine Albright, who was then Secretary of State, urged him to put off the trip, and when he said he was going anyway President Jacques Chirac of France loaned him his jet. Chirac asked the Secretary-General to extend his personal greetings to Saddam and to express his great esteem for Iraq.
On his arrival in Baghdad, Annan spoke of his mission as a "sacred duty." But diplomacy can be foul work. He and Saddam shook hands. They smoked cigars together; they drank orange juice. Annan told Saddam he was a leader of scope and "courage," a "builder," who had brought Iraq into the modern age, and reconstructed it after the Gulf War, and who now had the opportunity to save it from being pounded by American bombs, if only they could come to terms. Saddam returned the compliments, and, with their rapport thus established, the two men cut a deal: Iraq would not be bombed, and the weapons inspectors could get on with their task, albeit more gingerly.
U.N. press officers played the meeting as a triumph of peacemaking, and Annan himself emerged from the encounter in an uncharacteristically boastful, _veni, vidi, vici mood. Before he left Baghdad, Annan told a reporter that Iraq had been "demonized" by the international community and that the world was as isolated from Iraq as Iraq was from the world. On his return to Paris he received a hero's welcome at a state dinner, where Chirac raised his glass and praised him for averting the next world war. Back in New York, much of the staff at the United Nations poured out of the building to hail him, although the weapons inspectors stayed at their desks. (They thought they'd been sold out.) Annan told the adoring throng that he had not been alone but surrounded by the world's prayers. And he spoke the line that has dogged him ever since, saying of Saddam Hussein, "He's a man I can do business with."
In fact, Saddam had given Annan the business. The Security Council quickly approved the Baghdad agreement, and, while Clinton officials grumbled publicly about the details, there was considerable relief in Washington at not having to go through with the bombing. In short order, however, Iraq was reneging on its promises and throwing up hurdles to inspections. Six months after Annan's trip, in August, the Iraqis announced that they would no longer coöperate with inspections. At the end of October, 1998, Baghdad ordered the inspectors to stop all activities. Before long, Washington told the inspectors to pack up and leave in a hurry. A few days later, a fleet of American and British heavy bombers were in the air, less than an hour from their Iraqi targets, when Annan—who had been trying once again to get the Iraqis to reverse their defiant position—received a letter from Saddam agreeing to let the inspections resume. At very nearly the last minute, the White House called the planes back, and for a few weeks the inspectors did resume their dance with the Iraqis, which in early December once again ground to a halt. On the sixteenth of that month, the bombing began. "This is a sad day for the United Nations and the world," Annan said, and he added, "It is also a very sad day for me, personally." The air raids—dubbed Operation Desert Fox—lasted four days. A year later, the Security Council adopted a resolution imposing a new inspections regime, and periodically in 2000 and 2001 Annan sought to revive talks with Iraq to gain the inspectors access. But Iraq stonewalled, and last July he let the dialogue collapse.
Annan does not regret going to Baghdad in 1998. After all, the alternative was bombing, and, as he said to me, "After the bombing, then what?" Four years later, he had his answer. "Now we're all sitting back and saying, What has happened in the meantime? What did Saddam do during the four years that the inspectors were not there? This implies that the inspectors had an impact and were able to disrupt or at least prevent the Iraqis from doing what they would have liked to do." But it wasn't the bombing that stopped the inspections; Saddam did, and he emerged from the encounter according to his definition of victory: "insuring your enemy does not get what he wants." The bombs were punishment after the fact, part of a new strategy, known by Madeleine Albright's phrase, "to keep Saddam Hussein in his box." Thereafter, a former U.N. Iraq hand told me, "Clinton policy was to leave it for the next lot."
Now the next lot had come to the U.N., and nobody was asking Annan to go back to Baghdad, nor did he volunteer. In 1998, he had taken the worst drubbing of his career at the hands of American critics in Congress and the press, who charged him with everything from hapless naïveté to willful appeasement to serving as an Iraqi asset. "I know that some people on the Hill have a different idea as to how Iraq and President Saddam Hussein should be handled. That is not my concern," Annan said at the time, and he added, "The U.N. is not in the business of taking out any president. In our organization that is illegal."
"Kofi's big mistake was coming back from Baghdad and making too much of a thing about a great act of diplomacy with a dictator," a former Clinton State Department official said, adding, "I think he learned something from it, which is you've got to be extraordinarily careful when you're doing this, and avoid a lot of the theatrics and the color commentary, because you're going to piss somebody off who you're going to need." Annan certainly kept a much lower profile last fall. He didn't even tell anyone in his Secretariat what he was doing when he picked up the phone two days after Bush's speech and invited himself to a meeting of foreign ministers from the Arab League, who had gathered in the margins of the General Assembly. "We suddenly found him leaving—where is he going?" his chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, recalled.
"I told them I wanted to attend their meeting because they were pretty worried about what was going on, and it wasn't enough for them to be worried," Annan said. "They had to send a message to Saddam, that this is a new situation and he should not just play games." The Iraqi foreign minister was at the meeting, and the next day Annan received word that Saddam was willing to allow the inspectors back, without any conditions. He helped the Iraqis draft a letter saying as much, and he announced the breakthrough on September 16th. There were no crowds at the door this time around, no talk of sacred duties. The feeling at the U.N. was that there is nothing quite like the looming threat of overwhelming unilateral action to make multilateralism work.
Iraq's abrupt reversal in September caught everyone off guard. Experience offered no reason to believe in it, but the momentum of the course Bush had set left no alternative. And, strikingly, even as America has appeared to be marching for six months now along an inexorable path to war, since those few days at the U.N. in September when Annan set the tone and Bush raised the stakes, the story of the Iraq crisis in the Security Council has been entirely technical. In negotiating a new resolution, the Americans and the British had originally wanted any Iraqi violation of the weapons-inspection regime to be punishable by force, and the French, backed by Russia and a comparatively disinterested China, wanted to require that a second resolution be passed before military action might be taken. In the end, they agreed that the Council would at least have to be consulted and given a chance to debate the issue before Iraq incurred what the resolution rather coyly called "serious consequences." Although Iraqi regime change was not on the Council's agenda—officially, the issue was disarmament—everybody knew what that phrase meant, and the steady massing of American forces in and around the Persian Gulf insured that nobody would forget.
Annan's part in this debate was to stay in the background, talking constantly by phone with the Council ambassadors and the foreign ministers and heads of state of the P-5, urging patience and endurance in the negotiations. Colin Powell, who calls Annan a good friend, frequently speaks with him several times a week. "He is open, he listens, he doesn't roll over, and he always tries to do what's right," Powell said to me. "In the toughest of times, he is always there to give us a sanity check." Annan's guiding interest was to preserve unity on the Council, whatever it should decide, and on November 8th, when the Council passed Resolution 1441 with a vote of fifteen to zero, the feeling in the room was that—at least for the moment—everybody had won. The U.N. had redeemed itself, Powell said—"It showed its relevance, it showed its importance"—and he added, "If a war comes it won't be because George Bush wanted a war, or Kofi failed to stop a war. It's because Saddam Hussein was responsible for a war." After all, he told me, "Diplomacy is always a little bit harder than just saying, 'This is what I want to do—everybody fall in.' It is a body of sovereign nations, not a rifle platoon that you can order around."
But wars are always waged in the name of peace. In this case, nobody seriously doubted that the Iraqis had been pursuing their weapons programs, or believed that they would comply sufficiently with the resolution to satisfy the Bush Administration. So while reviving inspections was the only chance of averting a war, wasn't it also a way of giving international authority to a war? In order to keep the United States in the U.N., had the U.N. boxed itself in? "I do worry about that," Annan said. "That bothers me—that the U.N. may be used as a rubber stamp, yah. I think there will come a time where the line might be drawn, where there may be divisions—serious divisions which may not be bridgeable." But when the U.N.'s two highest ideals—multilateralism and peace—stand at odds, how does one choose? As a rule, a former political adviser to Annan said, "Kofi would say better a legitimate war than disunity and a sidelined U.N. In this respect, he's truly a son of the system, an institutional man."
When Kofi Annan was a boy in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was known under British rule, the big idea was independence. He was just nine in 1947, when India's example inspired members of the colony's educated and professional classes to form a party, the United Gold Coast Convention, to campaign for self-rule. The party hired a secretary named Kwame Nkrumah, who soon became—and remained, until Annan came to prominence—the world's most famous Ghanaian. Nkrumah's story is instructive, because it formed the backdrop for Annan's coming of age, and because it is a story of a deliberate political life, driven by ambition, defiance, and fixed ideas, which makes it entirely unlike Annan's story. Nkrumah, the son of a village goldsmith, was a schoolteacher who scrimped and saved to buy a ticket to America, where he enrolled in a black college, experienced segregation, earned a bachelor's degree in economics and sociology, worked in a soap factory, preached in black churches, read Marx and Lenin, earned a bachelor's degree in theology, sold fish in Harlem, did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, slept on park benches, washed dishes on a cruise ship, earned a master's degree in education, joined the Freemasons, taught Greek history, then moved to London, published a pamphlet ("Towards Colonial Freedom"), wrote most of a thesis on logical positivism for a Ph.D. in philosophy, joined a salon whose habitués included future African independence leaders—Hastings Banda (Malawi), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Julius Nyerere (Tanzania)—and returned to Ghana in 1947, at the age of thirty-eight, with an idea: nonviolent boycott. The next year, after joining in a peaceful march for autonomy in Accra, the capital, during which people were shot dead by police, Nkrumah was arrested and thrown in jail. In 1949, after he was released, he started his own movement, the Convention People's Party, renouncing the gradualist approach of his former employers and demanding full independence at once. Years of marches, boycotts, rallies, private debates, arrests, and releases followed. In March of 1957 Ghana, with Nkrumah as its leader, became the first sub-Saharan African colony to be granted independence.
In that same year, Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, a boarding school for boys, the country's oldest and most prestigious secondary school. Its Web site boasts of "many influential products," an "uncounted number of men of unexampled distinction," and Annan of course is first among them. The school was founded by the Methodist Church and run, in Annan's time already, by Africans, who followed a standard British curriculum and colonial ethos. Students were taught that come Christmas snow was not unusual; they played cricket; they wore uniforms with neckties—"shorts and sports and all that," Annan said. This was his Ghana, a crossroads culture, the mid-twentieth-century version of globalization (as always, a function of empire). Although his father was a Fante nobleman, his standing as a chief was largely honorary. He worked as an executive of the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch multinational corporation Unilever. The job kept his household on the move from city to city: a few years in Kumasi, a few years in Accra, a few years in Bekwai. Home for Annan was no fixed place.
Annan had three sisters, two older and his twin. Being a twin in Ghana, he said, was not as big a deal as it can be elsewhere in Africa: "In Benin, for example, you cannot say no to a mother of twins—you have to give her everything she wants—and in other places they try to kill them. For us it's O.K. It was a bit special at that time." But he did not elaborate. Annan is not given to talking much about his family or his early years. He does not shy away from the subject, but the way he recounts his memories of Ghana is curiously impersonal, as if he were summing up someone else's life or something he had read in a book. Perhaps this is because he has lived outside the country for all but two of the past forty-four years. Although he says, "I think Ghana is still home," he tends not to speak of himself so much as a Ghanaian but, more universally, as an African—an inheritance he characterizes fondly and selectively as a deliberative approach to life, marked always by a breadth of mind and generosity of spirit.
"I feel profoundly African, my roots are deeply African, and the things that I was taught as a child are very important to me," he told me. "Growing up in Africa, you had lots of people around you—cousins, aunts, grandparents, and friends of the family—so there always were people to talk to, people to seek advice from, people to play with, and a sense of friendship and love." He seemed eager to extract a connection between his earliest influences and his current life as a diplomat. "Patience was very much part of the culture," he said. "And this is why I sometimes find it very difficult to understand the African dictators of today, because in traditional African society people discussed issues. They talked and talked—you know, the tradition of palaver, you go under the tree and you talk. If you can't solve the problem, you meet the next day and you keep talking till you find a solution. The Africans have an incredible capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation and hospitality. I see the Africa I grew up in in somebody like Mandela, who is able to forgive and to reconcile. I don't see it in these brutal leaders."
Unlike Nelson Mandela, who is also of aristocratic pedigree, Annan took no part in his country's liberation. "I was too young to be involved personally," he said. The only rebellious action he likes to recall from his youth is a hunger strike he staged to protest the quality of the food at his boarding school, and it worked: the menu was improved. But defiance has never been Annan's style, and while politics fascinated him, the tug of ideology found little traction. He was not disposed to taking sides. In boarding school, he told me, he and his friends "were quite engaged, quite informed, following the struggle," and he said, "Sometimes we even role-played: who would belong to which party, and this sort of thing, arguing the point." Forty years after his graduation, and Ghana's independence, in his first months as Secretary-General, Annan sent a brief congratulatory message to be read to the graduating class of Mfantsipim, in which he recalled a lesson from his days there:
Once, I remember, Reverend Brandful took out a large white sheet with a black dot in the middle, draped it over the blackboard and asked us: "What do you see?"
We all answered: "The black dot."
"Why only the black dot?" he responded. "Why only the negative? What about the vast white spaces around?"
He was reminding us to always look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the larger picture, not to focus just on the blemishes. He was teaching us also to remember that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question.
Annan's executive assistant in the Secretariat, Elisabeth Lindenmayer, is a Frenchwoman who was born in Africa, in a small village in the bush of colonial Upper Volta—now Burkina Faso—where her father was stationed as a paratrooper. Lindenmayer has known Annan for nineteen years and worked at his side for more than a decade. She retains a deep affection for the continent where she spent her youth, and she offered an anthropological interpretation of her boss's faith in multiple perspectives. "It's very African to believe in symbols, in things that you don't see, in the unquantifiable," she said. Still, it is difficult to have things more than one way, and when it came to the political drama of his youth, Annan was genuinely undecided.
"My father was with the United Gold Coast Convention, not with Nkrumah's party but the other group," he told me, "and as a young man I think I was influenced by the discussions going on at home with my father and his friends, and others. But at the same time I was also emotionally drawn to the struggle for independence, and some of the statements Nkrumah was making—that we must stand on our own, we must have our own destiny in our hands." By Annan's account, it was only after the fact, when the British government was gone and there were Ghanaians in charge, that he grasped the full import of the liberation struggle. "We suddenly realized that change was possible—you know, this big important thing, the independence that seems so far away, that you've heard people talk of for years, suddenly it's there, we get it," he said, and he added, "Not only is change possible but one can effect change, one can be a participant, one can be a change agent and play a role. It was a very exciting and electrifying period, and of course we all felt that we had a role to play in building the new nation." Then, after a moment, he said, "When I joined the U.N."—in 1962—"I said, maximum two years and I'll go back. And here I am, forty years later."
Even after Nkrumah took power, his people used to summon his followers to action with the call: "Come and express your anger!" This would not have stirred a response in Annan, to whom anger is so nearly alien that he cannot quite account for its absence in his makeup except by rationalization. While he admits to occasional passing spasms of frustration or impatience, he dismisses anger as "a negative energy" and says, "I think when you have so much to do you can't really afford it. So to be rancoring, and let it linger, and be grumpy, and bear grudges, and all this—it's something that has never been part of me, because I find not only is it not necessary but it takes a lot out of you, it distracts."
Within the Secretariat, Lindenmayer is known as the only person to have ever seen Annan thoroughly lose his cool, and that was long before he had surfaced in the public eye, back in the eighties, when he was running the U.N.'s office of human resources, and the conduct of the appointment-and-promotion committee ignited his displeasure. "If somebody does not get angry often and suddenly gets very angry, I can tell you it's very powerful," Lindenmayer told me. She stiffened in her chair. "He was like a lion roaring, he was so angry at them," she said, and she went on, "I tell you, he's angry with his whole body—with his eyes. His anger comes from every single part of him. His voice goes down. It takes a register, like an organ, which is the lowest one. It's very, very frightening when he gets angry."
Others speak of once or twice seeing Annan's eyes narrow in a flicker of annoyance, but these are rare sightings, and tend to be mentioned with proprietary pride, as evidence of the speaker's inside position. As a rule, people who have worked or spent time with Annan are as much at a loss to explain his imperturbability as he is. Sir Brian Urquhart, who served in the U.N. Secretariat from 1945 to 1986, and has written extensively about the organization, put the problem as succinctly as anyone. "Why he doesn't get angry, God only knows, but he doesn't, and up to a point that's a great thing," Urquhart told me, but, he said, "It's very hard to tell what Kofi thinks about people, because he's such a nice chap. I mean, for example, if I was him, I'd be furious with Saddam Hussein, after the way he monkeyed with him in 1998."
So it was without a hint of bitterness that Annan said to me, "I was disappointed by the way things turned out in the end, once we'd achieved independence." That feeling came with time, and mostly from a distance. In the first flush of his awakening to the world's limitless possibilities for change, Annan went on to study at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where he quickly became vice-president of the national student union, and he wound up at a meeting of West African student leaders in Sierra Leone. There, somebody suggested that he apply to a program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, to give young Africans with leadership promise the opportunity to study in America. He did, and in the fall of 1959 he arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, on a scholarship to Macalester College, a small liberal-arts school with a strong internationalist tradition and the unusual custom of flying the U.N. flag below the Stars and Stripes. He was twenty-one years old, it was his first trip overseas, and the plan was to stay a year, then "go back and make a contribution." But he did so well at Macalester that the school gave him a second year's scholarship to complete his degree as an economics major, and in this way, with each opportunity abroad leading to the next, his plan to make a life in Ghana kept getting postponed.
Annan had arrived in America just as the civil-rights movement was gathering force with marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, and he says it struck him as "almost a continuation" of what he'd witnessed at home. "The culture was different, the approach was different, but the objective and the desire was the same. So you could empathize," he told me. Once again, he followed the local developments with interest, without feeling any involvement. His closest friend was a Swiss political scientist, Roy Preiswerk, who took an avid interest in the issues of decolonization, and became a pioneer in development studies. Once when they were out walking with a Korean friend along the banks of Minnehaha Creek, they were accosted by a group of young drunks, who passed by in a boat and began shouting, "What's this black doing here? Go back where you came from!" Annan recalls that his friends were angrier than he was. "It was interesting to see," he said.
In the summer of 1961, a young adviser to foreign students at Macalester started a program to take some of his advisees on extended road trips through the American hinterland. He called the operation Ambassadors of Friendship, after the car that was donated to him for the trip, a Nash Ambassador, and Annan was one of the four students to join him on the excursion. They travelled for two months, and Annan recalls going into a restaurant and seeing two waitresses whispering to each other. He heard the older tell the younger, "You tell them, you tell them," and, he said, "She almost rushed to us and blurted it out—'I'm sorry, we don't serve blacks.' " What struck him was her embarrassment, and, telling the story, he chuckled softly, as if he were embarrassed for her. Susan Linnee, a Minnesotan who established a lifelong friendship with Annan in those years, and who is now the Associated Press bureau chief in Nairobi, remembers hearing a much more pointed story from that trip: "They went somewhere and Kofi needed a haircut. The guy said, 'We don't cut niggers' hair,' and he said, 'I'm not a nigger, I'm an African,' and the guy said, 'That's O.K., come on, siddown'—and cut his hair."
What struck Linnee about this was "the difference between Africans' and African-Americans' thinking about race." She said, "Kofi didn't think about it. It was never a question of race for him," and she noticed that it was the same for a Nigerian aristocrat he hung around with. "They didn't think they were in any way involved. They didn't even think of colonialism as a matter of race," she said. "Kofi in his entire life never experienced anything that was any kind of struggle. I think he thought it was nice that Ghana became independent, but there was never any sense of drama to it." Then as now, Linnee found Annan to be, above all, "a facilitator," someone who sought the common ground among people and tried to bring them together. He liked America. He felt at ease here, as he felt everywhere. He was quick of mind and body, and set a record for the sixty-yard dash at Macalester that stood for many years. Linnee remembers him at parties, teaching people to dance the Hi-Life. "He's the ultimate smooth dancer, where nothing moves," she said.
In the autumn of 1961, Annan grew his beard. He had moved on to Geneva on a Carnegie fellowship to do graduate work in economics, and he stopped shaving his chin and upper lip until the goatee appeared. "People now think it is part of his elegant look," said Georges Abi-Saab, an Egyptian who was in Annan's circle at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and is now a professor emeritus there. "At that time it was a symbol, a kind of distinctive sign. It was a Lumumba beard, and many of the young African people had this Lumumba beard." Patrice Lumumba, the first (and last) popularly elected leader of the Congo, was killed in January of 1961, and the crisis in the Congo, which triggered one of the first massive and agonized U.N. military interventions, dominated the international headlines, especially when U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash on a diplomatic mission between warring factions there. Both men quickly acquired the status of martyrs, and although Annan now speaks frequently of the influence of Hammarskjöld, it was Lumumba who captured his imagination at the time. "Lumumba symbolized African nationalism and progressive nation-building—even if he didn't live up to it," Abi-Saab said to me, and he recalled with passion those days when Third Worldism and the nonaligned movement—"a kind of progressive open nationalism"—were in the air. "That was the context in which we met," he said of Annan, and he added, "It was a period of euphoric optimism among young people of the Third World, who thought they could change their countries and participate in changing the world. That was the general atmosphere, and he was very much in that trend."
Abi-Saab, who described himself as "a bit of a purist" in political matters, is impressed that Annan kept his beard. Few Africans from that period did, and he likes to think the facial hair means that the Secretary-General has remained loyal to the ideals of his youth. But the more he talked, the more it became clear that Abi-Saab was unsure exactly where Annan had stood in the politically charged debates of their student days: "He could perceive what others say, and perhaps with hindsight I'd say also what others want. Most of us have our sympathies and antipathies. Kofi, on the other hand, was someone who was on good terms with everybody. And this proved to be a great asset for him. I thought, and I still believe, he had his own convictions, and he believed in them and so forth. But he was not very aggressive in expressing them or defending them in a way that hurt the others. He always had a very smooth touch."
Abi-Saab allowed that memory can be distorted by intervening impressions, and he said, "We were all much more passionate then. Life somehow cools you down." But he wondered whether a life spent in the U.N., a system that exists in the name of principle yet survives by compromise, might not be especially cooling, and he said of Annan, "Remember that he spent from 1962—forty years—in the machine, and he has been a consummate user of the machine as well as being part of it."
When I told Annan that I'd spoken to Abi-Saab, he remembered the heated debates—about "how we were going to change the world"—with his bearded friends in Geneva. "It was sort of the folly and dreams of the young," he said, and once again he spoke of his disappointment in the betrayed promises of independence. "There was disillusionment in the sense that we could have done much better," he said. "We could have given our people a much better life and we failed them. I mean, when you take my own country at the time of independence, we had in economic terms about the same situation as Malaysia. We had almost the same amount of reserves in the bank, and you look at where Malaysia is today and where Ghana is today, and I say it's a question of instability and mismanagement." Like so many bold liberation leaders, Nkrumah was a bad president. The monomania that had served him in revolution translated, when he sat in the statehouse, into dictatorship and unhappiness for Ghana: a cult of personality, a clampdown on free expression, economic decline, extreme corruption, and finally, in 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to China, a military coup. He died in exile in 1972, and returned home in a coffin.
Annan didn't leave Ghana to escape misrule. A chance encounter had presented him with an opportunity, and he told himself he would return better prepared to help his country. He went to Geneva in the same spirit. He had no political aspirations, nor did he impress those who met him and admired him as notably ambitious. His mind was practical; in pursuing his degrees in economics, he anticipated following his father into the business world. But, as his own scope broadened during his student years in America and Europe, he watched his prospects at home steadily shrinking; at the same time, he saw that he was valued as an African in the international sphere. The United Nations was growing fast, absorbing newly decolonized nations. Nineteen-sixty had been the Year of Africa, with sixteen new states from the continent admitted to the General Assembly, and the Charter requires that the U.N.'s staff be hired to reflect as closely as possible its membership. In the early summer of 1962, when Annan left graduate school to become an administrative and budget officer at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, he entered the U.N. bureaucracy with P-1 status, the lowest possible rank in the international civil service, and for nearly thirty years he ascended through the administrative and management hierarchy, a functionary who quickly mastered each new task put before him and drew no public attention.
Annan did not commit himself to the organization all at once. He still wanted to do his bit for Africa, and in 1965 he arranged to get posted to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to work at the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. He spent six years there, just as the Organization of African Unity was being created. "There was lots of political energy—electricity in the air," Annan said. "All these leaders came to Addis to talk about Africa and its development, and we were on the economic side, and you could see that if we all did what we were supposed to and pooled our efforts and worked well, we could make a difference."
In fact, Ethiopia was sliding into desperation under the corrupt reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. By the time Annan packed up to leave, in 1971, thousands of Ethiopians were facing famine in regions that had fallen into Selassie's disfavor. Even as a hub of pan-Africanist enthusiasm, Ethiopia presented a troubling scene. Among the continent's new leaders who passed through Addis, those who worked for the common good were outnumbered by abusive despots. The late sixties and early seventies were the glory days of such men as the self-deifying kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, of Congo (or Zaire, as he came to call it); the lunatic President for Life (later Emperor) Jean-Bédel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic; and Milton Obote, of Uganda, who had connived with his Army chief, Idi Amin, to stage a coup and reinstall himself as a military dictator in 1966, only to be ousted for real by Amin in 1971.
Annan's gloss on his Ethiopian sojourn is typical of the way he speaks of his first three decades with the U.N., which are summed up on his two-page official biography in a single long sentence that consists entirely of a selective list of his successive job titles. For most of this dimly lit time in his career, the U.N. was largely hamstrung by the divisions of the Cold War. The paralysis was most pronounced on the Security Council, where the great powers of the P-5 used their opposing vetoes—or threats of a veto—to control most matters in which they had a stake. As a diplomatic salon, the U.N. served the crucial function of keeping the superpowers talking to one another, and in confrontations like the Cuban missile crisis the public debate may have helped avert a world war. But there was no question of seeking, or failing to seek, a resolution when America went to war in Vietnam, or when the Soviet Union took over Afghanistan. The Council's deadlock in those decades extended equally to the myriad wars fought by Soviet and American proxies elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The General Assembly took up some of the political slack, but such actions as the passage of a resolution equating Zionism with racism served as a reminder that even when multilateralism functions, majority consensus is no guarantee of sobriety, or proof against hostile intentions.
Inevitably, the effects of Cold War factionalism and stalemate among the U.N.'s member states tainted the organization's internal order as well. Following the death of Hammarskjöld in 1961, the office of Secretary-General was filled by bland figures who commanded little reverence from their staffs and who understood that the first requirement of their job was to keep a low profile. Within the international bureaucracy, it was a time of stagnation, and if demoralization and corruption were not the rule, neither were they exceptional. A post at the U.N. was regarded as a cozy sinecure, with good pay, a diplomatic passport, and bankers' hours. Jobs were frequently traded as political favors, and at times were simply bought and sold. For those who were content merely to keep their desks clean, a sense of serving a worthy larger purpose lightened the burden of idleness. But for anyone animated by a desire for consequence, the U.N. system in the sixties, seventies, and eighties could often be a source of frustration and restlessness.
In 1971, when Annan left Ethiopia, he took a year's leave to pick up a master's degree in management, as a Sloan Fellow at M.I.T. Although he returned to serve the U.N. for a series of brief postings—in New York, with a peacekeeping force in Egypt, and with the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva—he could not forget that he had once intended to pursue a very different life. Annan's year in Minnesota had turned into fifteen years as an expatriate, and in 1974 he accepted an offer to manage the Ghana Tourist Development Company, setting up hotels along the coast. He was then married to a Nigerian woman (his first wife); he had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo; Susan Linnee remembers Annan telling her that when they arrived in Ghana his daughter's response was "Daddy, why are there so many black people here?"
He had gone back—"to see, to help," he said—but it was a bad time; Ghana was under military rule, and he did not find himself at home. "So after a couple of years, I left again," he told me, adding, "I think probably if I had felt when I went to Ghana that there was space and I could do what I thought can be done and could find like-minded people for us to work together, I probably would have stayed, I probably would not have returned to the U.N." Shashi Tharoor, the Under-Secretary-General, described Annan's foray into the Ghanaian business world, and his retreat from it, as "emblematic of the way people like he and I feel, that one of the reasons we want to serve the international system is we've grown up in societies which need the international system to work well." When Annan signed back on at the U.N. in 1976, it had been fourteen years since he entered the system, and it would be fourteen more before he was tapped for his first political mission.
With the end of the Cold War, in the late eighties, the Security Council was suddenly able to find common ground on many outstanding crises. All at once, it seemed, the Council was dispatching U.N. missions everywhere: to end the war between Iraq and Iran; to oversee the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; to supervise elections in Namibia and Nicaragua; then on to El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique. The Council's decision to authorize the use of force to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 reflected its newfound spirit of international coöperation. The violation of the sovereignty of a nation was what the organization had been created to oppose.
Annan had risen to the post of Assistant Secretary-General in charge of personnel. It was in that capacity that he was sent to Baghdad during the buildup to the Gulf War, to seek the release of hundreds of U.N. international staffers, and other foreign workers, who were being held hostage. He succeeded, and was sent back to Baghdad the next year, after the war—now as the chief financial officer of the U.N. system—to work out a blueprint for the "oil for food" deal. Then, in 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed him to the No. 2 post in the newly established Department of Peacekeeping Operations. A year later, he became Under-Secretary-General in charge of the whole department.
The speed with which Annan was handed these new responsibilities was a reflection not only of his capabilities but also of the improvisational approach of the U.N. Secretariat to the unprecedented burden of its multiplying missions. In 1989, peacekeeping had been handled by a suboffice of the political department, staffed by six people who oversaw around fifteen thousand troops, whose main task was to monitor front-line truces in such places as Cyprus and Kashmir. Four years later, when Annan took over the portfolio, there were thirteen U.N. peacekeeping missions in the field, with fifty-four thousand troops, and many of the newer missions were in countries where there was no real peace to keep: Cambodia, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and, within the year, Rwanda. With the exception of the mission to Cambodia, which was able to claim a deeply compromised success before it withdrew, all of these operations would meet with catastrophe on Annan's watch, at the end of which he was elevated to Secretary-General. It was "a baptism of fire," Iqbal Riza, his chief of staff, told me, and for anyone less steadfastly uninflammable it might have been an immolation.
History is largely a saga of unfinished business. So, on the Monday morning last November when the first team of United Nations weapons inspectors to visit Iraq in four years stepped onto the tarmac at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, Kofi Annan was in Sarajevo, telling three women representing the Mothers of Srebrenica—an association of survivors of the 1995 massacre in the U.N.-designated "safe area"—that he was happy to have the opportunity to meet them. "I know the tragedy you've been through," he said. "It is something that one can never forget." Annan kept his opening remarks at the meeting brief. "I want to hear from you," he said. "I want to hear about your concerns. It's a difficult and a painful situation. We can't turn the clock back, so we have to collectively see how we can best deal with the situation and move forward."
The slaughter of as many as seven thousand Bosnian Muslims, nearly all of them male, in Srebrenica, in July of 1995, was the largest genocidal massacre in Europe since the Nazis were forced to stop exterminating Jews. And, as Annan later observed, in a report that he presented to the General Assembly in November of 1999:
The fall of Srebrenica is also shocking because the enclave's inhabitants believed that the authority of the United Nations Security Council, the presence of unprofor [U.N. Protection Force] peacekeepers, and the might of nato airpower, would ensure their safety. Instead, the Bosnian Serb forces ignored the Security Council, pushed aside the unprofor troops, and assessed correctly that airpower would not be used to stop them. They overran the safe area of Srebrenica with ease, and then proceeded to depopulate the territory within forty-eight hours. Their leaders then engaged in high-level negotiations with representatives of the international community while their forces on the ground executed and buried thousands of men and boys within a matter of days.
The report quotes from the indictment for war crimes of the former Bosnian Serb President, Radovan Karadzic, and his Army chief, Ratko Mladic, and tells of "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history" at Srebrenica: "thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson." Srebrenica was just one of six safe areas established by the U.N. under Security Council mandates during the Bosnian war, and as many as twenty thousand people were killed in these enclaves. The U.N. safe areas were among the most unsafe places on earth in the mid-nineties.
Seven years after the slaughter was brought to an end by nato bombing and the Dayton peace accords, Annan was in Sarajevo to mark the closing of the U.N. mission there, and his visit with the Mothers of Srebrenica was the last event on his schedule. "Yes, there is peace, but there is no justice," the first mother told him. "With the United Nations in our country, we got our borders—they have done a lot—but there are still many things to be done. You know that Karadzic and Mladic are still at large." Despite a five-million-dollar reward offered by the State Department, the two men continue to live in the former Yugoslavia, unmolested by nato troops. "We know it is not the job of the U.N. mission to arrest them here," the woman said to Annan, "but we kindly ask you as a human being, because you meet a lot of people, to tell those people that this is really becoming ridiculous—that even small children now realize that it's a game." Another mother said that twenty-two of her family members were still missing, among the more than five thousand victims of Srebrenica whose remains have never been found. "If they did not have the right to live, please help us to find their bodies—to bury them in dignity as every human being deserves," she said. She reminded Annan that in the Netherlands there was still an ongoing inquiry into the massacre. Dutch troops made up the unprofor contingent that essentially handed Srebrenica over to Mladic. "Mr. Kofi Annan," she said, "if we ask you to come there and say what you know as a human being, not as a politician, would you do that?"
In his report, Annan had acknowledged that, as the head of peacekeeping, he was among those responsible for the abandonment of the people of Srebrenica. But, despite the prominence of his position, he remained in the background of the horror. The retreat of U.N. missions in the face of slaughter had by then become an agonizingly familiar spectacle, and Annan had learned to keep a low profile as a technocratic middleman in the machinery of international dysfunction. The excited, can-do spirit of the immediate post-Cold War period at the U.N. had been effectively extinguished in October, 1993, when eighteen American soldiers were killed in Somalia. A week later, the U.S.S. Harlan County, a Navy ship carrying peacekeepers to Haiti, was greeted by a lightly armed mob of protesters on a dock in Port-au-Prince and retreated back to sea.
"The impression has been created that the easiest way to disrupt a peacekeeping operation is to kill Americans," Annan complained early in 1994, following a talk in New York in which he rebuked the Security Council for following America's lead and recoiling from its commitments. A few months later, at the start of the genocide in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration called for the complete withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers there, even though no American troops were involved. The force was reduced from twenty-five hundred to two hundred and seventy men, who could do little more than watch as eight hundred thousand people were massacred in a hundred days.
As the U.N. ricocheted from one killing field to another during this period, its effectiveness was hobbled not only by the difficulty of mustering troops and matériel but by the Security Council's antipathy toward crossing "the Mogadishu line" from strictly neutral peacekeeping to overt taking of sides. In Bosnia, as in Rwanda, however, passive neutrality was tantamount to complicity with the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder. "We will not just swallow the fact that we were protected by the U.N. and were betrayed anyway," one of the Mothers of Srebrenica told Annan. "We really believed the United Nations. And what happened? They deceived us." She thought that the U.N. should pay the survivors some sort of compensation.
The mothers interspersed their toughest sentiments with expressions of gratitude for Annan's attention, and for the solicitousness and assistance given them by his emissaries in Sarajevo over the years. But, for all their cordiality, there was not a word of forgiveness in their remarks, and Annan did not ask for it. "I feel your pain, and I understand what you've gone through," he said. "What you went through was not anything any of us can pardon." He called the suggestion that the U.N. had a responsibility to the survivors, and should pay them compensation, "a novel idea." But it would require Security Council approval, he said, and—"quite frankly, speaking honestly, not to raise your hopes—I don't think they will entertain that thought."
Annan's impressively detailed report on Srebrenica describes the enfeebling process of triangulation among the Security Council, the U.N. Secretariat, and unprofor troop contributors and commanders, but its ultimate effect is to obscure rather than to clarify individual responsibility. Individual actors are more often identified in the narrative by job title than by name. The profusion of these actors, and of the more broadly anonymous institutions or governments they represented, along with the combined weight of their misjudgments, overcautiousness, gullibility, and sheer cowardice in the face of a party of notorious ethnic cleansers and exterminators who had repeatedly hoodwinked them in the past, creates an impression of collective responsibility that comes uncomfortably close to a spirit of collective exculpation. In this respect, the report simultaneously exposes and replicates multilateralism in its most unctuous form, as a theatre of international damage control—a diplomatic safe area. What is missing, even more than a precise attribution of responsibility, is any notion of accountability, which is what the Mothers of Srebrenica seemed to be asking for.
Although Annan struck a tender note of reckoning in his farewell remarks to the mothers, it was not their plight that preoccupied him but that of the U.N. "In the kind of conflict we saw here, the third party has a vital role," he said. "What is worse is when nobody cares or pays any attention. The third party who gets up and says, 'This is enough, this cannot be acceptable, this cannot go on,' and tries to take steps to help, has an impact on encouraging the victims to fight, to resist, and to carry on. Sometimes they may be around to bear witness. They may not be able to resolve the conflict and solve all the problems, but it doesn't mean that they didn't try. It doesn't mean that the involvement of the third party focussing attention on the issue and getting the people to fight back is not something that we shouldn't treasure. I really wish things could have turned out otherwise, but the intentions of coming to help and coming to assist were good."
The "safe areas," however, weren't established to provide international witnesses to slaughter, much less to encourage anyone to fight back. They were set up as sanctuaries for the defenseless. The people of Srebrenica were assured that they would not be abandoned, and then the U.N. forces handed them over to their killers, without a word of protest from the Security Council or the Secretariat. Of course, as Annan said, in order to fail one first has to take steps to try to help. But to treasure the effort regardless of the results is kindergarten talk—or, worse, the language of martyrdom—and suggests a profound reluctance to acknowledge the nature of war.
Elisabeth Lindenmayer said that Annan has often told her that he learned a lot from being an athlete—most important, how to lose. "And to live is to learn how to lose as well," she said. "So everything becomes a lesson for him." Time and again, in talking to Annan's colleagues and friends, I was told that he has an ability to focus selflessly on the issues at hand, and on the interests of the U.N., which he truly believes are the interests of the world. "With Kofi it's never about him," John Ruggie, a political scientist at Harvard who worked as an adviser in Annan's Secretariat for four years, said. "His ego's just not involved." This is always spoken of as a virtue, and in many aspects of private and public life it is. But war calls also for martial values, pride, a personal stake—not just in your own life but in your cause, which in the U.N.'s case is every noncombatant's life. In his remarks to the Mothers of Srebrenica, Annan was speaking not only of Srebrenica but, more broadly, of Bosnia—and, yes, during the war the U.N. presence was, over all, much better than nothing. Is that really an acceptable standard for the man Lindenmayer calls "the moral conscience of the world"?
The sound bite that hit the international wires from Annan's visit to Sarajevo in November came from a press conference he had given at the parliament, where he called upon Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. resolutions "for the sake of his people, regional stability, and world order." The Mothers of Srebrenica were last century's news, and Annan's visit to them was a courtesy call. On the same day, Korea announced for the first time that it had developed nuclear weapons; Israeli troops were battling Palestinians in Hebron and Gaza; a plan for the reunification of Cyprus that Annan had put forward a week earlier was being debated by Greeks and Turks; and the Nigerian government was trying to calm its people about a territorial dispute with Cameroon that Annan was also trying to mediate. There were riots in Colombia, troops in the streets of Caracas, antigovernment demonstrations in Haiti, a crackdown on dissent amid rumors of civil war in Kyrgyzstan.
Annan's true business is conducted with ambassadors, foreign ministers, prime ministers, and presidents. To keep in touch with his constituents, the governments of member states, he spends roughly a third of each year travelling; last year, he visited fortyfive countries, at least half a dozen of them twice. As he calls on one head of state after another, he frequently points out that the United Nations was not founded in the name of governments but of "we the peoples." For the U.N. to fulfill its mission, he said in his Nobel lecture, it must "focus, as never before, on improving the conditions of the individual men and women . . . whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation." Whether the problem is "ethnic cleansing" or poverty, he said, "What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations." And he said to me, "It is very difficult to look around the world, at the suffering of people who can't even speak up, who don't have a say in decisions affecting their own future." But in Sarajevo, three such individuals had been gathered before him, and they did not need to be told about the cost of being ignored.
A few weeks after the publication of the Srebrenica report, Annan presided over the release of a similar report on the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The story of Rwanda is not only more appalling than that of Srebrenica on account of its scale but also because the outside world's disengagement from Rwanda was not the sort of tragedy of careless good intentions that Annan described in Sarajevo. It was a matter of deliberate policy, and for the Clinton Administration the evasion of the world's post-Holocaust commitment to prevent genocide could not properly be called a failure. Washington's policy was to leave Rwanda to its own devices, and in that it was successful. Nor did the United States have a hard time persuading the rest of the U.N. to back off. France's position, as a protective patron of Rwanda's genocidal regime, was at least as compromising to the formulation of a credible international response. In fact, Rwanda itself had a seat on the Security Council, and its representative was accorded all diplomatic respect as he baldly lied about the crimes of his government.
The story of Rwanda offers crushing proof that unity on the Council is no safeguard against cravenness. Unlike the Srebrenica report, which was commissioned by Annan and prepared by U.N. investigators, the Rwanda report was the work of an independent panel. And while it identified the overriding source of the U.N.'s failure as "a lack of resources and a lack of will" coming from the member states, the Rwanda report named names, and it found that the actions—and, more important, the inactions—of the Secretariat and of Annan's peacekeeping department had, at crucial junctures, facilitated the indifference of the Council and of the member states in general.
In 1998, the year before the report was released, Annan had visited Rwanda, and addressed the parliament. His audience was composed almost entirely of people who had been targeted for death. They applauded heartily when a government minister introduced him with a lengthy dressing-down. Annan tried to shrug this off. "The guest is always the prisoner of the host," he remarked, and then read his speech. "We must and we do acknowledge that the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil," he said. "The world must deeply repent this failure." But he drew the fury of his listeners when he went on to remind them, in scolding terms, that Rwanda's horror "came from within," and that Rwandans had to get their own house in order. A presidential spokesman denounced him as "arrogant," and top members of the country's post-genocide government boycotted a state dinner in his honor.
It did not help Annan's case that in unscripted remarks during the same trip he dismissed questions about the way he and his deputies at peacekeeping headquarters had downplayed an astonishingly precise warning about an impending extermination campaign—and plans to kill peacekeepers at the outset—sent to them by the U.N. force commander in Rwanda three months before the genocide began. "This is an old story which is being rehashed," he said. He also made the astonishing declaration that he felt no need to apologize personally in Rwanda, because, he said, "I have no regrets." But a year later, after the report took him to task for failing to brief the Secretary-General and the Security Council about the force commander's warning, and described his failure to follow up on the information as "incomprehensible," he said: "All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it. On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse." His response was still carefully impersonal.
Annan's habit of speaking in the name of the U.N. when he is criticized, and of casting the collective burden of the organization's failures on the shoulders of the world at large, stands in stark contrast to his willingness to take credit when there's praise to be had. It is a deeply ingrained reflex among U.N. officials to blame the member states for the organization's failures, just as the member states blame the U.N. for theirs. Invariably, there are well-founded grievances on both sides of this seesaw of complaint, but they cannot properly be judged by the same standards.
Michael Barnett, a political scientist who served at the American mission to the U.N. during the Rwandan catastrophe, and who has written a book called "Eyewitness to a Genocide," put the problem precisely. "To be cynical, I expect very little of member states," Barnett told me. "I don't necessarily expect the United States or France to rush into every killing field. That's not how they understand their purpose. But I do expect U.N. officials to act in a way that reflects an idea of the greater moral burden of the international community. They escaped scrutiny for years, because it was thought, Hey, these are U.N. officials—why wouldn't they do their very best? Everybody bought the line that they did everything they could. And they bought it themselves. There's lots of blame to go around, but I worry that their failure to really account for how they conducted themselves means that they haven't internalized it."
Given Annan's sphinx-like demeanor, it is difficult to tell what he has internalized. "I've never seen him flustered by professional setbacks," Shashi Tharoor told me, with admiration. "I remember at one point we were talking about something we'd been attacked for in Peacekeeping—I can't even remember what it was—and Mr. Annan said, 'Children only throw stones at trees that bear fruit.' It's a lovely line because it means that we're being criticized because we're doing something." Tharoor described Annan's decision to accept and publish the Rwanda report as an act of "courage," which is an opinion widely shared in the Secretariat. When I mentioned this to Sir Brian Urquhart, he said, "Well, maybe it was courageous, but it was also an extremely shrewd move." After all, in quite literally bringing the skeletons out of the closet, the report created the impression that the U.N. had nothing to hide.
A number of Annan's closest associates told me that they believed their boss was treated unfairly in the Rwanda report, because nothing he could have done in the months before the genocide would have made the member states a jot more willing to act when the killing began. This amounts to saying that the genocide was inevitable, and that the peacekeeping mission was useless from the outset. Annan himself said much the same thing when we talked on the evening before he left Sarajevo. In his view, whether the member states knew in advance that a genocide was being planned is immaterial. "I say, when they knew, what did they do?" he told me. "They went to Rwanda, picked up their nationals, and left." By then, however, all hell had broken loose. On the first day of the massacres, ten U.N. blue-helmets were killed, just as Annan had been warned; and, as Annan never tires of saying, there is a world of difference between preventive peacekeeping in a permissive environment and attempted peace-enforcement in the teeth of a full-blown conflagration. Even if Annan's decision to keep his force commander's warnings to himself did no measurable harm—and that is a big, and unprovable, if—the fact remains that not doing wrong is a far cry from doing the right thing. The Security Council's pusillanimity in the face of the slaughter is not in dispute, but what are we to make of Annan's certainty that it would have been pointless to raise the alarm months earlier? How can he know when he didn't even try?
"Maybe we were overly cautious," he said.
Annan's Nobel Peace Prize shocked many of those who remembered the dead in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Yet, as an institutional man, it is not his soul but the soul of the U.N., if one can speak of such a thing, that concerns Annan, and it is in this capacity that he was awarded his share of the Nobel—not for ending or preventing wars but, as the citation said, for being "preeminent in bringing new life to the Organization." This revitalization is largely a consequence of getting Washington to pay its dues, and of the reorganization of the U.N. bureaucracy. But, beyond staving off bankruptcy and stagnation, Annan's larger mission of reform has been to salvage the U.N. from demoralization and marginalization by reversing the legacy of his peacekeeping years. To that end, his agenda has been propelled, where it might have been expected to be dragged down, by his intimate experience of past failures.
According to Richard Holbrooke, Annan got his job because of his willingness, in the summer of 1995, to look beyond the narrow habits of conventional peacekeeping. In August of that year, in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre and of a mortar attack on civilians in an outdoor market in Sarajevo, Annan agreed to nato's aerial-bombing campaign, which finally drove the Serbs to the negotiating table at Dayton. Until then, nato airpower had been hamstrung by what was known as a "dual key" arrangement with the U.N., whereby both the Secretary-General and the nato command had to approve any air strikes, and Boutros-Ghali had vetoed all but the most limited pinprick bombing, for fear of appearing to take sides. But when Boutros-Ghali was travelling, Annan was left in charge of the U.N. key. "When Kofi turned it," Holbrooke told me, "he became Secretary-General in waiting."
"I think we cannot live through some of the things that we lived through in the nineties without being affected, without being changed," Annan said to me in Sarajevo. He was staying at the Holiday Inn, where a decade earlier, at the start of the war, the U.N. had set up its first offices just one floor away from the headquarters of Radovan Karadzic. Through the open window of Annan's suite, the sound of church bells mixed with the crackling wail of an evening call to prayer from a mosque. "I must say, to come back to Sarajevo today and see how they have rebuilt the city and to see people in the streets, when it used to be empty when you drove in from the airport—buildings without roofs, burned down, charred . . ." He trailed off. "You ask yourself," he said, "How can human beings be so wicked and brutal? Where is our conscience? Where's our humanity? How can this happen? And where was the rest of the world? Couldn't we have done more? Did we do enough? We were here, but was it enough?" The only possible answer was no. But Annan was more interested in the question: Why not? And to that his answer was, as always: The member states didn't want to.
During the Rwandan genocide, Annan had set off a brief flap among African diplomats when he suggested to _Le Monde that the reason African governments weren't contributing troops to peacekeeping was that they "probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations." During our talk in Sarajevo he reminded me that, in establishing the Srebrenica "safe area," the U.N. had originally asked for nearly thirty-five thousand peacekeepers to maintain it but was able to muster fewer than eight thousand from member states. At the same time, he said, the mandate kept shifting, and donor governments kept dithering about their commitments to the mission. Faced with such "dishonest" maneuvers, he said, "The U.N. gets set up and then it's blamed. And also you relieve the conscience of people, thinking, We've done something, we've sent in the U.N., even if it's a man and a half." Under the circumstances, he told me, "We should tell them, 'We can't do this.' We should give them the honest assessment of what we need. The decision is theirs."
For Annan, the chief lesson of the past decade is that the U.N. must say no to impossible missions and insufficiently supported mandates. "Peacekeepers must never again be deployed into an environment in which there is no cease-fire or peace agreement," he said, in the conclusion of his report on Srebrenica. "If the necessary resources are not provided—and the necessary political, military and moral judgments are not made—the job simply cannot be done." Of course, crises like Bosnia and Rwanda will continue to arise, and over the years Annan has argued that sovereignty must not be allowed to serve as a shield when a government turns against its civilians. In such cases, he supports "humanitarian intervention"—military action to protect endangered people. Annan has even suggested that preëmptive military action may be justified to avert the threat of a massive slaughter or a genocide. ("Oh dear," Colin Powell said, chuckling, when I mentioned this to him. "Then why do we get beat up?")
As long ago as 1994, while the killing was still in full swing in Rwanda, Annan said that "if there is going to be another enforcement mission . . . it's likely to be the Desert Storm model—where the Security Council would authorize a group of member states to take all necessary means to correct or redress a situation." That is precisely the model that has been in play since he became Secretary-General. Annan was unhappy when nato states, faced with the threat of a Russian veto, bypassed the Security Council to intervene in Kosovo, but after the fighting the Council gave what amounted to retroactive approval to the action by placing the territory under U.N. administration. In East Timor, the Australians led a regional coalition that brought an end to the killings, pillage, and arson of Indonesian soldiers and militiamen run amok, and a U.N. administration then presided over the newborn country's transition to self-rule. In Afghanistan, the Council authorized the force led by the United States that drove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from power. And in early February the Council dispatched French and West African troops to attempt to enforce a tenuous peace treaty in the Ivory Coast.
Annan has been supportive of each of these interventions. But the reliance on ad-hoc coalitions of national armies to take on the missions that the U.N. is incapable of managing leaves the organization more dependent than ever on the will of its member states. In each of the most recent cases, the primary military force in the campaign has come from countries with strong historical or strategic interests in the region. For places that lack such an appeal, there is no new model, and that means that much of Africa, in particular, is more orphaned than ever. For the past three years, Annan has been unable to raise a force of even seven thousand troops—the number that failed to hold Srebrenica—to beef up the U.N.'s minuscule peacekeeping mission in Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, where it is estimated that two to three million people have died since 1998 as a result of civil war and foreign occupation.
Annan's overriding objective in reconceiving peacekeeping strategy was, as he said, to protect the U.N. from getting set up and blamed, and in this he has been remarkably successful. Since he took office, there have been no more false promises of protection made under the U.N. flag, no further infamies in the field, no more sagas of recrimination between the Secretariat and the member states. The record is clean, and its cleanliness has done much to restore trust in the U.N., and to bolster Annan's stature as a reformer and as a guardian of world order. Yet, as the case of Congo makes plain, the greater security of the U.N. does not necessarily translate into greater security for endangered peoples. It is estimated that more people have been killed in the fighting in Congo each month than have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the past two and a half years. Since the beginning of this year, tens of thousands of Congolese civilians have been displaced from their homes, and U.N. investigators have recently confirmed that rebel forces in the Ituri forests of the northeastern Congo have been massacring, raping, and even eating the Pygmies who have dwelt there for centuries.
When I asked Annan how he thought the U.N. would respond if a situation like Rwanda in 1994 were to develop suddenly in Africa today, he said, "I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I'm really not sure that it would shape up differently. I'm really not sure that the international community and countries with capacity would be ready to go. I was asked this by a young Rwandan woman when I gave a lecture at the Kennedy School, and I said, 'I wish I could give you the assurance, but I can't.' Honestly, I couldn't, and I can't today. But it doesn't mean I should give up."
The paradox of Annan's tenure as Secretary-General is that he has strengthened the U.N. by diminishing its pretensions and ambitions to exercise the sort of power that sovereign states exercise. Indeed, he has succeeded in making a virtue of the organization's practical weakness. The U.N. no longer does what it cannot do properly, so it no longer invites expectations that it cannot fulfill, but it has grown in stature as a hub of diplomacy, where the most important matters—war and peace—are debated, negotiated, and at times, at least temporarily, resolved. What the U.N. offers its members—its primary product, as it were—is legitimacy. Annan's political credo is pure multilateralism. The Security Council's decree is international law, and anyone who acts outside it is an outlaw in the international community. That is what he means by legitimacy: the U.N. seal of approval.
Annan's position is unambiguous, or so it seemed, anyway, until George Bush laid down his challenge in the General Assembly in September. Bush wanted the U.N.'s approval, but he did not ask for legitimacy. He believed that he already had it, because Saddam had flouted so many U.N. resolutions, and he was inviting the U.N. to legitimate itself. Bush purported to be suing for peace, and for a time it was not only imprudent but impossible to say that an American invasion of Iraq was inevitable. After all, by submitting to the diplomatic process, Bush opened himself to the remote possibility that Saddam would comply so fully with weapons inspections as to moot the prospect of war. But there was little doubt as to what Bush expected once the inspectors got to work: either Saddam would obstruct them or they would find his weapons, and one way or the other, in short order, the Iraqis would be shown to be in "material breach" of the Council's resolutions. Even Annan, who made no secret of his hope that the resumption of inspections might avert war, expressed little confidence in Iraqi cooperation. "It's difficult to say what Saddam thinks would be a positive outcome," he said over breakfast in Washington a few days after Resolution 1441 was passed. "The only guide I could have is they keep saying they have no weapons of mass destruction, which nobody believes."
The debate over the passage and implementation of Resolution 1441 in the following months was as much about the fate of the U.N. as an arbiter of legitimacy as about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "If the U.S. walks away from the table and acts unilaterally, there's a very good risk that the U.S. won't walk back, and that's a big challenge to the Security Council," a European diplomat said. "So it's a game of chicken. The U.N.'s all about consensus, and if the U.S. comes and says, 'Our way or no way,' it's very unpleasant." Considering the stakes for the U.N., he said, "This is a conflict that could turn out to be about the way the world is ordered—by shared rules or by a return to a world of great powers."
On his way back to New York from the Balkans, just before Thanksgiving, Annan stopped in Paris for a lunch of red mullet, squab, cheeses, and terrific twelve-year-old wines, with President Jacques Chirac, at the Élysée Palace. They finished off with a mandarin ice, and descended for a brief "press encounter" in a baroque ballroom, ornately pilastered and gilded, with lots of cherubs in the ceilings. Annan said that full Iraqi compliance with Resolution 1441 was "the only way to avoid a military conflict in the region," and Chirac rumbled that "all outcomes are possible" if the Iraqis failed to meet their obligations. "For the Europeans, building on the lessons of two world wars, sovereignty is in a sense shared. We are building our European destiny together," the French Ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, told me in Paris. "A euro is shared sovereignty. Would you consider sharing the dollar with the Mexican and the Canadian? Give them a say in the future of the dollar? Of course not. Sovereignty for you is paramount. For us it's a value which must be shared in the world of today and even more tomorrow. So for us the U.N. is not a problem."
Leaving aside Chirac's historical softness on Saddam, and French oil interests, it was somewhat implausible for a diplomat from one of the most fiercely nationalistic and independent-minded countries in the world to suggest that sovereignty is a matter of indifference. Levitte got at the deeper truth about his government's position, it seemed, when he said, "We need the U.S. in the U.N., fully participating. Otherwise, everybody loses." For, just as the Security Council can serve as a check on America's freedom to project its power abroad, France's permanent seat on the Council amplifies its importance on the international stage. When the U.N. was established, France was a global power by virtue of its empire, with colonies in Indochina, the South Pacific, and across north and west Africa. Now, shorn of its overseas dominions, France would be just another midsized European power (albeit with nuclear bombs) if it weren't for the extraordinary leverage of its veto on the Council. Bush's professed willingness to go it alone in Iraq posed a threat to the French, but they welcomed the debate as an opportunity to exercise some influence. "We were so happy when we heard Bush's speech on the twelfth of September," Levitte said, and he added, "So now what we hope for is that President Bush will act according to what was agreed. The rule of the game is very clear."
In Washington's view, too, the rules were clear: comply or die. But the Bush Administration's eagerness for U.N. collaboration in its campaign against Saddam sent a message that counteracted its high-noon rhetoric and endowed the Council's multilateralist mission with more immediate relevance than it has had since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Never, in the intervening years, had the U.N. been more important as a forum for international debate; and never had it been more imperilled by the prospect of being left on the margins of the action. Annan played his part in the drama by preserving a tone of perfect impartiality, stumping simultaneously for peace and for the unity of the Council. But with each passing month, as Saddam remained defiant and Bush kept massing forces around Iraq, the two principles appeared increasingly incompatible, and Annan began speaking of a grim day of reckoning ahead for the multilateralist order.
The Bush Administration's patience for diplomacy seemed unlikely to endure much beyond the onset of the crippling heat of the Arabian summer in the latter half of March, and as Washington intensified its pressure on the Council to gird for war, the French mounted a diplomatic counter-offensive. It was no longer just the fate of the U.N. that was at stake in the transatlantic rupture. The broader multilateralist order of the Western world, represented by nato and the European Union, appeared to be coming apart at the seams. On February 14th, when Hans Blix reported that Iraq was still not fully and actively coöperating but might yet come around, the French foreign minister's impassioned plea for more time drew applause from spectators in the Council gallery. Rather than hardening the international rift between hawks and doves, however, this moment of triumph for France gave way almost immediately to a cooling-off period. Washington, still in lockstep with London, delayed demanding a timetable for the diplomatic endgame or a new resolution that would authorize the use of force, and France, feeling that it had been paid attention to—that it had demonstrated the limits of Yankee power and proven the world to be multipolar after all—joined with the European Union in thanking the Americans for exerting the military pressure on Iraq that made inspections possible, and reaffirming that all options were open, even war. But, speaking for himself, Chirac made it clear that a Council veto was also possible.
Annan still spoke of a peaceful way out of the crisis, as long as everyone involved stuck to the technical and legal terms of the Council's resolutions. The onus was on Baghdad, of course, but while travelling in Europe late in February Annan urged the European Union and nato allies to "lower the decibels, avoid the tendency to turn on each other, and focus on Iraq." He spoke of the E.U. and nato not as independent centers of global power but almost as if they were subsidiaries of the U.N. whose tussles were getting in the way of the broader international cause. "If they had accepted the primacy of the Security Council and said, 'The Council is dealing with it, and we don't have to get involved here,' they wouldn't have had all these divisions," he told me. He used what were, for him, particularly sharp words about Washington and London's lofty justifications for an assault on Baghdad. "Quite frankly, some of the recent arguments about wars of liberation, and of moral law . . . these are issues that the Council has never discussed. For the Council, the issue is disarmament, and all these other issues muddy the waters, and the public gets confused, and the Security Council and the U.N. members get confused."
In the absence of any new discoveries of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration has groped for an alternative casus belli: a link between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, Saddam's cruelty to his own people, democratization of the Middle East. But, like any legal system, the Security Council cannot sustain such extraneous arguments and must focus on the case before it, and despite Annan's past talk of supporting "humanitarian intervention" to bring dangerous tyrants to heel, he has carefully avoided making such a case against Saddam. Still, as Hans Blix made clear on Valentine's Day, even by the loosest interpretation of Resolution 1441, Iraq remains in contempt of international law; and, by all accounts, Saddam's defiance was strengthened by the antiwar speeches that followed Blix's report. This leaves the Security Council in the same bind Bush placed it in in September, when he confronted it with its own logic and proposed that for the first time in history the world should go to war in defense of U.N. resolutions. For now, a U.N. diplomat observed, "The United States is having a problem with the Council similar to the one Blix contends he's having with the Iraqis. They're getting coöperation on process but not on substance. Ultimately, process will not be enough, not for Blix and not for the United States, and that will be the U.N.'s moment of truth."
Despite the threats of irrelevance, the bitter fraying of old alliances, and the possibility that instead of preventing war the Security Council will legitimate a campaign that few of its members believe to be desirable or just, the Iraq crisis has been a tremendous boon to the U.N. Whether out of hope or desperation, public opinion is far better disposed to entrusting the decision on whether to go to war against Saddam to the Security Council than to the White House. "In the past, one would have expected only politicians and diplomats to refer to the Security Council, or say we have to go to the Security Council," Annan said to me. "But now, incredibly, you see the peoples of the world, in whose name the Charter was written, saying, 'Don't ignore the Security Council.' And this is not just outside the United States but even in the U.S."
Annan wants the Council to take a unified position—and if that means war, so be it. If peace cannot be preserved, then Annan will stand for international order. In the logic of the United Nations, every war should be, in effect, a world war—a collective quest for collective security—and as one of Annan's aides put it to me, "No one sees a way out." Another member of the Secretariat put it a bit less gloomily. "I suspect we may all look back on this period as a time when the world sought to show it has an influence over what the U.S. is ultimately going to do in Iraq, when in reality that influence is marginal. That said, the importance of the U.N. for future crises should not be underestimated." After all, he said, "Next time the world needs to come together to address a global threat—even if we can't agree on how to do it—this is where it will happen. Where else?" ♦