The negotiator

For those who take a sour view of Annan, his willingness to embrace hot air and his aversion to conflict are his defining characteristics. That view took hold among hawkish Americans in early 1998, when Annan flew to Baghdad for frantic negotiations with Saddam Hussein to avert a looming war over Saddam's restrictions on U.N. arms-control inspectors. (Annan won an agreement, but Saddam soon reneged, and the Desert Fox bombing campaign ensued.) Annan was similarly unable to act forcefully enough to punish his son Kojo when it emerged that he had lied about his employment with a Swiss firm that benefited from the corrupt U.N.-administered oil-for-food program in Iraq. Annan has a notorious inability to fire people; his closest officials have been with him for decades, and when he was pushed to fire one of his deputy secretary-generals, he ended up promoting her instead.

Traub's book really kicks into gear in the aftermath of the Security Council's confrontation over the invasion of Iraq. Angry American conservatives push investigations into the Oil-for-Food program in order to depict the U.N. as collaborating with Saddam's regime. Annan is driven into a depressed funk as the investigation of his son Kojo tars him personally. His attempt to get the U.N. involved in post-invasion Iraq leads to the bombing deaths of dozens of U.N. staff, some of them personal friends. Headquarters staff are bitter at Annan for allowing the U.S. to yank the U.N.'s chain; the U.S., his former patron, now sees him as part of the U.N. problem. But Annan gradually hauls himself, and the organization, out of this funk, establishing a panel to hash out a deep program of comprehensive reform. He pushes long-standing senior staff members aside in favor of a new reformist cadre, appointing the dynamic head of UNDP, the British Mark Malloch Brown, as his new No. 2. (This in turn leads some staffers to accuse Annan of abetting an Anglo-American putsch.)

It is in this sequence that the great merits of Annan's slow, inclusive but relentless mode of persuasion become apparent. The driving force behind the U.N. reforms is American, and to some extent European, anger at the organization's corruption and listlessness. But the only internal U.N. constituency for reform comes from a number of countries that want to win permanent seats on an expanded Security Council, for reasons of prestige -- Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and a coalition of African countries. Annan deftly insists that these countries advance the broader reform program as the price for continued work on Security Council expansion. Over a period of months, he nudges the reform package through working groups that water it down into a set of proposals with broad, if unenthusiastic, assent. At each step along the way, Annan uses sympathetic contacts in the U.S. State Department to ensure that the proposals are acceptable to Condoleezza Rice. The target is to approve the reforms at the World Leaders Summit, the follow-up to 2000's Millennium Summit, in September 2005.

And then, in the summer of 2005, the new U.S. ambassador John Bolton descends upon U.N. Headquarters, more or less like a bat out of hell. Many Americans of an internationalist bent were dismayed at the Bush administration's choice of the combatively unilateralist Bolton, who had famously stated in the early '90s that if 10 stories were lopped off of the U.N. Headquarters building, no one would notice. But after his failed confirmation hearings and recess appointment, Bolton dropped out of the headlines. It was a poor choice, many felt, but how much damage could one guy do?

Traub provides the answer: Bolton was a disaster, not just for the U.N., but for the U.S. Arriving after the reform document had been largely agreed upon, in discussions involving over a hundred member countries, Bolton suddenly announced he wanted more than 140 changes in the final document. He wanted all references to the International Criminal Court deleted. He wanted references to wealthy countries' Millennium Goals commitments of increased foreign aid taken out.

Annan and the reform party in the U.N., who had been carefully clearing the document's language with the U.S. State Department, were shocked. Bolton seemed to have a different agenda than Rice. What did the U.S. actually want? Did it even know? In any case, the effect of Bolton's new demands was the opposite of what he intended: They opened the door for obstructionist third-world dictatorships to introduce their own objections. Countries like Cuba, Algeria and China were unhappy with U.S.-driven efforts to reform the U.N.'s Human Rights Council. They had gone along with the reform drive rather than be seen to torpedo much-needed changes, including Security Council expansion. But now that the U.S. could be blamed for the reforms' failure, all bets were off. Bolton's incompetent diplomacy had succeeded in holding the U.N. reform process hostage to Fidel Castro.

Traub's depiction of Annan's battle of wills with Bolton, as the September 2005 deadline draws near, is nothing short of thrilling. It's like watching a practiced cowboy break a mustang. By the time Annan has Bolton tied down so he can whisper gently in his ear, the U.N. reform package has suffered considerable damage. But a package is passed, and the momentum for further reform is kept alive.

Liberals and other internationalists will enjoy watching Annan redeem himself, and the U.N., with a victory over the arch-neoconservative Bolton. It's the satisfying ending to Traub's version of "Great Expectations," with Annan at last defeating his selfish American benefactors, who raised him up and then tried to control him. But the dirty secret, for internationalists who have experience with the U.N., is that we know Bolton was partly right. A large proportion of the U.N.'s staff is occupied in doing nothing of any value, and the U.N. as an institution has very little power except where its member nations want it to. The U.N.'s own top staff recognize this. Traub quotes Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown: "The fact is, I do think what a lot of people do here is basically crap. Being in this position, I've discovered how bad things really are."

The flip side of such criticisms, however, is that nothing can be accomplished in a multilateral institution like the U.N. with threats and ultimatums. Moving the U.N. does require the occasional dose of Boltonesque straight talk, but what it requires much more is a very un-Boltonesque willingness to engage in agonizing negotiations, to pay people compliments they don't deserve, to embrace hot air. In the aftermath of Bolton's resignation in early December, some of his opponents magnanimously praised him as a sincere man. The genius of "Best Intentions" is to show how Annan's willingness to skirt or stretch the truth, in order to advance the U.N.'s principles of humanitarianism and global cooperation, represents a different and, in this case, more powerful kind of sincerity.

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