Dysfunction and potential at the U.N.

Shorr, David

JAMES TRAUB. The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. 464 PAGES. $26.00

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE for solving the world's problems? It's a more serious question than it seems. In the end, all discussion about the United Nations is really about assessing liability for one state of affairs or another--wars, repression, destitution. If you culled through the story lines about the UN as if you were diagramming sentences, you'd find the subject "United Nations" is usually followed by the verb "failed." But what is the proper expectation of the world body? If this entity is held answerable for so many of the world's miseries and injustices, then surely we must know at whose feet we are laying all this blame. The common image is of unaccountable bureaucrats ensconced in their mid-Manhattan offices. But can we seriously say that these employees themselves have the means to stop wars and end poverty, if only they would?

In the opening pages of The Best Intentions, New York Times Magazine contributing writer James Traub describes hearing "a kind of easy contempt for the institution." The author is referring to the Security Council split over Iraq, but his phrase is apt for the great majority of commentary that surrounds the UN. Contempt is very easy indeed. There is precious little accountability for criticism of the United Nations. The critic is never asked what she would do instead, how an alternate solution would work, and whether the alternative would actually solve a given problem.

To his credit, Traub tours the recent history of the UN with a scrupulously reasonable set of expectations. In each episode, he is mindful of practical and political constraints. He sifts through the options that were at hand--separating the feasible from the illusory and weighing the tradeoffs. What emerges is an organization caught in the middle. Traub shows the UN pushed and pulled between rigid principles and power realities, ground-level facts and diplomatic detachment, and most of all, history's greatest superpower and, well, everyone else.

As to the author's assignment of blame, he is unsparing, yet without a tinge of righteous indignation. His book was written with the cooperation of (and privileged access to) the United Nations' seventh secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Traub places him at the center of the story. It is a sympathetic portrait of a career functionary who boldly challenged the UN upon assuming the helm of the organization he had served for his adult life, and the author acknowledges his sympathies.

Given the scorn heaped upon the United Nations, such a stance may be justified, if only as a corrective. But of course the struggle to achieve global peace and freedom (i.e., the highest intentions) is itself inherently compelling. Traub's greatest service is to bring the lofty struggle down to earth and show its poignant messiness. And crucially, he highlights the roles played not only by Annan and his UN staff colleagues, but also officials of the 192 national governments that comprise the UN--the true rulers of the system, who have much more leverage than the staff does over the problems of the world. In keeping with the book's careful reporting and rigorous accountability, U.S. and other national policymakers are named, with minimal use of anonymous sources.

Among the most tragic "failures" popularly ascribed to the United Nations, perhaps the greatest is the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Traub reminds us that the international community's offense was not merely a sin of omission. It was a matter of policy to recoil from the mass slaughter, and that policy was made in Washington, not New York. When the UN Security Council was deciding whether to maintain or withdraw its peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, President Clinton's Secretary of State Warren Christopher instructed UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright to insist on a withdrawal.

That said, while the staff of the United Nations serves national governmental masters, it does maintain the apparatus through which collective international action is organized. Staffers are thus liable for the performance of that function, and their record with respect to Rwanda is not much better than that of member states. One key responsibility is to take the measure of situations on the ground and tell UN member states what it will take to rectify them. UN officials, including Kofi Annan, who was then head of peacekeeping, did not sound the siren of an impending Rwandan genocide despite clear warning signs. This was detailed mercilessly by the United Nations' own investigation.

Traub gives an incisive description of the UN Rwanda report's verdict, covering both the staff and the member states: a "collective cognitive failure, or act of willful blindness ... the insistence on characterizing a situation as amenable to traditional UN instruments despite the increasingly transparent reality that it could only be resolved by force."

THE ROOT PATHOLOGY of optimism at the UN is not idealistic naivete, but self-deception. The Best Intentions does cite purists in the organization who argue that added violence from the outside will always worsen a situation, but they are not credible. Hesitance to act really stems from the difficulty of acting. The right course of action is always politically difficult and logistically formidable, and sometimes demands the investment of blood as well as treasure. Rather than facing up to these realities, UN staff and diplomats tailor their assessments, options, and recommendations to fit the will to act, instead of the other way around. The nonpurist staff in the book appear worn down by member states' resistance to taking acti-ion and a pervading skepticism that difficult steps by national governments are really required. The result is an utter mismatch between the tools and the real-world problems they are supposed to fix. When all you have is a staple remover, every problem looks like a staple.

The most persuasive diagnoses of the UN's weaknesses point toward a cultural pathology. Traub cites former Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch-Brown's depiction of "'a culture of political complicity' in which all parties conspired to evade accountability." The international body--whose purpose is to promote progress around the world--is too often a world unto itself. Instead of addressing the most pressing issues and crises in the global system, countless person-hours are devoted to obscure subjects that are seized and built up for their political symbolism.

At moments, UN member states come together to exert collective pressure, as on Syria after the February 2005 assassination of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri. To have a global political instrument for such harmonic convergences is a necessity. But these moments are too few and far between. Rather than the mobilization of decisive political will, the dominant mode at the UN is a test of wills over symbolic issues, one that does not serve the ideals of the UN or the peoples of the world.

The debate over Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion was no exception. Among the skeptics, swing-voter governments such as Mexico and Chile took the political high road, while France milked the confrontation for all the grandstanding it could, never mind that it had (together with Russia) run interference for Saddam for years. Washington and Paris focused too much on each other rather than on the real problems of Iraq and its defiance of the many UN Security Council resolutions directed at it.

The common theme of these symbolic debates is often the specter of outside intervention in nations' internal affairs and the erosion of their sovereignty. There are serious issues relating to the nature of sovereignty, with legitimate arguments on both sides. The United States needs to be more aware of its overbearing power and less callous about the dignity of other nations. Stronger, less anarchic sovereign states are critical to the causes of both peace and development. On the other hand, sovereignty is not a license for governments to do as they wish with their citizens. But the vast majority of skirmishes over sovereignty in the UN have nothing to do with these complex and tricky issues. They are political sport, plain and simple.

Can this world body be saved? It can certainly be improved, and badly needs to be. Chartered as it is to mobilize the world community for the world's betterment, it has ample room to boost its performance. But there is no make-or-break test of its usefulness. However the political will and impact of the world body may fluctuate, the international community has an essential need for an instrument through which it can take collective actions. The challenges of a world with porous borders, demographic explosions, and economic disparity cannot be addressed without it. These realities were understood as well by Kofi Annan as by anyone, and the crowning ambition of his tenure was to spur the UN to rise to the occasion. The climax of The Best Intentions, and of Annan's effort, was the 2004-05 push for sweeping reform. This focus enhances the book's value, because that initiative was little appreciated and little understood, and is an excellent window not only onto the UN's dysfunctions, but also its potential.

REFORM IN THE United Nations classically focuses on institutional architecture, tinkering with the organizational chart. Annan's platform, first presented by his advisory High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, called for a revamped political agenda and renewal of purpose across the entire range of global issues. Underlying this exercise were holistic concepts of security and interdependence that were both reflective of the contemporary world and tailored to diverse political interests within the community of nations.

Not only were porous international borders allowing the flow of terrorists, black market economies, conflicts, and infectious disease--threats now shared by all--but those threats themselves were now clearly interconnected. The conceptual boundaries were also breaking down between the traditionally separate issues of arms proliferation, development, terrorism, and human rights. Traub quotes a passage from Annan's reform report, In Larger Freedom, in which the secretary general explores the meaning of the word freedom to show how concerns that historically have been sources of political division are truly melded together:

 Even if he can vote to choose his rulers, a young man with AIDS who
 cannot read or write and lives on the brink of starvation is not truly
 free. Equally, even if she earns enough to live, a woman who lives in
 the shadow of daily violence and has no say in how her country is run
 is not truly free.

In other words, democracy is cold comfort amid rampant hunger, disease, and illiteracy. Still, woman does not live by bread alone. Political liberties are not the be-all and end-all. And the separation of the "hard security" agenda of war, terror, and proliferation from "soft security" issues such as development, health, and education is artificial and short-sighted. Or, as Traub paraphrases Annan's premise, "collective thinking and collective action had become matters of dire necessity, not merely noble aspirations."

No one could expect the leaders of the world to adopt this paradigm shift as a sudden shared revelation. Different elements of the reform package naturally would hold greater appeal for some member states than for others. The aim was a grand bargain between the developed and the developing world. The northern industrial powers could reaffirm their commitment to economic development, and the developing world would reciprocate by treating the terrorist threat more seriously.

Of course, meaningful reform could only be achieved by compromise. Annan's effort would only succeed if all sides moved toward one another, making significant concessions in exchange for payment in kind. Unfortunately, true to UN diplomatic form, posturing rather than problem-solving ruled the day, and while some significant steps were taken, they fell far short of the renewal of purpose envisioned by Annan.

The fundamental choice for the member states of the United Nations is whether they want the world body to be primarily a vehicle for action on global problems or a debating society. A problem of political culture can only be solved by a change in political culture. The discourse within the United Nations needs to be re-oriented. The diplomats who work there must spend less time eyeing each other and get to work providing safety, prosperity, and rights for the people they represent.

Sooner or later, the UN's members are bound to make this shift, because the authors of the reform agenda, some very seasoned statesmen and women among them, were right and captured essential realities of today's world. If the international community remains deeply fragmented, all problems will get worse--repression, terrorism, poverty, proliferation. Collective action is indeed a dire necessity. Political leaders will one day realize how much they need each other and stronger instruments of cooperation, and they may well revisit Kofi Annan's vision. The question is, how long will it take?

David Shorr is a program officer in policy analysis and dialogue at the Stanley Foundation.