UN BOOKSHELF
Recent books about the United Nations 0ffer lesson, cautionary tales
Chris O'Sullivan
Stanley Meisler's new book, Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War, reveals that in March 2003, at the very moment the Bush administration launched its war against Iraq, neoconservative activ¬ist Richard Perle wrote an op-ed piece in the British newspaper the Guardian titled "Thank God for the Death of the UN." Perle was convinced that America's victory in Iraq would be the first step in a global backlash against the United Nations, bringing about that institution's demise and, in its place, American global dominance. It didn't quite happen that way, as the five books under review demonstrate.
These recent books about the UN underscore its relevance in a troubled world. The books are united in their sympathetic explo¬ration of the way the UN and its personnel have stood up to the challenge of an American administration not only convinced, as Perle was, that unilateralism and military intervention are the one size-fits-all answer to the world's problems but, in some cases, genuinely dedicated to the UN's destruction.
Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Vintage edition, 2007).
Kennedy's curious title comes from a igth century Alfred Tennyson poem about the nations of the world uniting to prevent war. An historian interested in the big picture, Kennedy's many books have addressed topics as sweep¬ing as the rise and fall of great powers, so it is noteworthy that he has written his latest book about the United Na¬tions. This is an important work of intellectual history, as Kennedy has the historical skills to firmly establish the creation of the United Nations as the culmination of philosophical discourse on peace and war dating back to the Enlightenment thinkers.
Kennedy writes from a sense of ur¬gency that the world is heading toward catastrophe unless we better utilize the UN's ability to prevent conflict. His chapter "A Troubled Advance to a New World Order" reminds read¬ers of the circumstances of the UN's founding at the end of World War II, and he warns of regressing to the early 2Oth century mindset prevalent among nations when they selfishly pursued their aims in conflict with one another — with catastrophic results. The author emphasizes what a profound development the UN has been since its establishment in 1945, owing largely to its universal legitimacy, and he illustrates how the UN holds the greatest potential for the attainment of Tennyson's quest for peace.
Stanley Meisler, Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War (Hobo-ken: John Wiley and Sons, 2007).
Meisler, who wrote a well-received his¬tory of the UN for its fiftieth anniversary in 1995, The United Nations: The First Fifty Years, returns to the subject with a sympathetic account of the life and career of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Meisler knows his subject well, having covered the UN for a decade as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. The explores Annan's rise, making connections between Annan's early life and his behavior and actions in a series of senior appointments at the UN. The author tells the compelling story of Annan's careful balancing act between an American administration determined to go to war in Iraq, and an international community that remained less than convinced by America's claims.
Meisler's chapter on Colin Powell's February 2003 speech before the secu¬rity council reveals Annan's approach, as the Secretary-General knew Powell's claims about Iraqi weapons and links to terrorism were dubious, but Annan remained determined to avoid a com¬plete break with the Americans. His assessment of US ambassador John Bolton's brief tenure at the UN makes for gripping reading, as Annan grew increasingly exasperated by Bolton's bullying tactics and stridency, yet the Secretary-General patiently avoided being taken in by Bolton's baiting. Meisler's exploration of Annan's life and times is a worthy companion to Brian Urquhart's classic biography of another significant Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, which is still in print (Hammarskjold, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
James Traub, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006).
Traub's subject, Kofi Annan, is similar to Meisler's, but his fly-on-the-wall approach yields different results. The author is less interested in Annan's early life, but he nonetheless provides valuable insights into Annan's tenure as Secretary-General. Traub demon¬strates how Annan navigated the many challenges he and the UN faced during a perilous time for the institution. As Traub makes clear, Annan's second term coincided with an administration in Washington essentially committed, at the very least, to the UN's margin-alization and, at most, to its destruc¬tion. Some members of the American administration openly expressed their desire to see the UN disappear. Yet, in the end, the durability of the UN was revealed, and Traub, like Meisier, sees the UN's very endurance as something of a vindication and affirmation of its legitimacy.
Samantha Power, Chasing the flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (New York: Penguin, 2008).
Many know Samantha Power only as a former Ba rack Oba ma advisor who was forced to resign after criticizing Hillary Clinton. That would be unfortunate because Power has written a thought¬ful and, at times, unsparing account of the long diplomatic career of Sergio Vieira de Mello,the Secretary-General's Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in Baghdad in 2003.
Following her Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper, 2002), Power's telling of Vieira de Melio's life and career in East Timor and the Balkans is compelling. But it is her account of his tragic death in Iraq that is most harrowing and troubling. Vieira de Mello and twenty-one mem¬bers of his staff were killed in Iraq's first major suicide bombing in August 2003. America's inability to effectively protect the UN mission, and its falter¬ing and mistake-prone effort to rescue Vieira de Mello after he was pinned under debris for hours following the explosion, revealed larger problems of confusion and incompetence that would come to plague the American occupation of Iraq in the years ahead. Moreover, the destruction of the UN mission essentially disabled the UN in Iraq. While this may have elated the administration's neoconsetvatives who believed the United States should act alone in Iraq without the interference of the UN, it was the UN, and officials such as Vieira de Mello, who might have provided Iraq with the kind of skilled and tested expertise at peace¬making, peacebuilding, and political negotiation that the American oc¬cupiers so obviously lacked. Someday, when the war in Iraq is finally over, readers would be advised to return to works such as Chasing the Flame to better understand how it all went so tragically wrong.
M. James Wilkinson and Alison Broinowski, Our Last Best Hope: Why the United Nations Stumbles and What the United States Should Do About It (New York: I Universe, 2008).
The most recent addition to the titles about the United Nations is a call to action. Written by two diplomats with extensive experience at the UN (Wilkinson is an American, Broinowski an Australian), Our Last Best Hope reads as a powerful call to future leaders or policymakers. While many of the other recent books on the UN look to the past, or offer insights into how the UN works today, Wilkinson and Broinowski offer a series of bold, yet achievable, policy recommendations.They also use examples from the UN's recent past to illustrate their points.
The authors emphasize that as long as American officials desire to see the UN fail, the institution's true potential for good will remain elusive. The authors make clear that the UN cannot address these many challenges alone. Rather, it requires a new American strategy that aims to use the UN in new and inno¬vative ways. Unfortunately, America's overmilitarized foreign policy has lost its way, and is in danger of allowing its once-valued soft power capabilities to atrophy.
The authors demonstrate that the cur¬rent US administration's policies on arms control,the environment, human rights and international law reveal an ideological rigidity that contributes toward seeing the world of today as much like the world of the late-igth century. That's not only bad policy, as Wilkinson and Broinowski skillfully demonstrate, it's also bad history, as revealed by the accounts by Paul Ken¬nedy and Stanley Meisier.
What these five books share is an un¬derstanding that the world has changed profoundly since the founding of the UN at San Francisco in 1945.
These works also remind us that the United Nations is primarily in the busi¬ness of preventing crises. One reason authors often have found it difficult to praise the work of the UN is the same reason the news media has such dif¬ficulty: acts of prevention are difficult to assess and explore. After all, how do we discuss something that has been prevented? The news media is not in the business of producing headlines proclaiming "famine prevented" or "war averted" and authors have dif¬ficulty finding publishers enthusiastic about peacemaking,crisis aversion,and the prevention of war.
The UN, and UN personnel, have re¬ceived eleven Nobel Peace Prizes (three during the current Bush administration alone) for efforts ranging from ending wars, peacekeeping, the protection of refugees and, most recently, bringing global attention to the climate change crisis. These Nobel Peace Prizes have illuminated the UN's many contribu¬tions toward alleviating the suffering of the world, but have also drawn attention to the organization's efforts to prevent crises. Works such as the five books here under review seek to achieve that same objective, and are worthy editions to any United Nations bookshelf.
[Chris O'Sullivan, a fellow at the Center for International Studies, teaches inter¬national history at the University of San Francisco, and is a member of the board of directors of UNA-SF. He is the author of The United Nations: A Concise History (2005,2008) and Sumner Welles: Postwar Planning and the Quest for a New World Order(2007).]
