A good example of this incomprehension was Annan's opera bouffe negotiations with Saddam Hussein. These mandarins fail to grasp that men with guns do not respect men with nothing but flapping gums. administrators, who think that no problem in the world is too intractable to be solved by negotiation. The failures of the United Nations should not be blamed just on the great powers. bureaucrats who complain that they did the best they could with inadequate resources, and he suggests they be given more support in the future. Wherever possible, Shawcross blames such messes on the permanent members of the Security Council, whom he indicts for blocking the expansion of these missions. official who describes the peacekeeping mission to Cambodia as "a model and shining example" because of the election staged there in 1993 - never mind that Hun Sen promptly usurped power after losing at the ballot box. Although the book is generally sober, at points Shawcross gives in to giddiness, as when he describes the secretary-general as "the world's 'secular pope'" and "the repository of hope and the representative of such civilized standards of international behavior as we have been able to devise." At another point, Shawcross quotes (with no discernible irony) a U.N. peacekeeping - and in Annan - does not appear to have been seriously shaken. He even concedes that humanitarian aid may sometimes do more harm than good by prolonging a war.ĭespite the failures he chronicles, however, Shawcross' faith in U.N. peacekeeping - much of this book is written from the viewpoint of Annan, with whom the author traveled the world - Shawcross is too honest a reporter to gloss over its failures. diplomacy and humanitarian interventions in the past decade. Shawcross presents a highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot, chronicle of U.N. The arrival of Deliver Us From Evil, a new book by British journalist William Shawcross, provides a good opportunity to ponder whether this is a realistic expectation. Presumably, Secretary-General Kofi Annan - who was head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping department at the time - hopes that an institutional mea culpa now will wipe the slate clean and allow the organization to play a more vigorous role in the future. The organization's meddling was worse than useless: its blue-helmeted troops were used as hostages by the Serbs to deter a military response from the West. declared safe areas for Muslims but did nothing to secure them, letting the Serbs slaughter thousands in Srebrenica. peacekeepers in Rwanda stood by as Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi. The United Nations itself has recently released reports documenting two of its worst stumbles. They have been chastened, presumably, by the U.N.'s almost unrelieved record of failure in its peacekeeping missions. officials making similar suggestions today, only a decade later.
President Bush spoke of a "new world order." Candidate Clinton talked about giving the United Nations more power and even its own standing military force.
The Gulf War, the U.N.'s second-ever military victory, seemed to vindicate those hopes - even though, as in the Korean War, the baby-blue banner was used as a mere flag of convenience for an American-led alliance. With the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that had paralyzed the Security Council had become a thing of the past, supposedly freeing the U.N. The United Nations started the 1990s with such high hopes.
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