The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power
Author: James Traub
A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, who was widely counted one of the greatest UN Secretary Generals, was nearly hounded from office by scandal. Indeed, both Annan and the institution he incarnates were so deeply shaken after the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq in the face of opposition from the Security Council that critics, and even some friends, began asking whether this sixty-year-old experiment in global policing has outlived its usefulness. Do its failures arise from its own structure and culture, or from a clash with an American administration determined to go its own way in defiance of world opinion?
James Traub, a New York Times Magazine contributor who has spent years writing about the UN and about foreign affairs, delves into these questions as no one else has done before. Traub enjoyed unprecedented access to Annan and his top aides throughout much of this traumatic period. He describes the despair over the Oil-for-Food scandal, the deep divide between those who wished to accommodate American critics and those who wished to confront them, the failed attempt to goad the Security Council to act decisively against state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in Sudan. And he recounts Annan’s effort to respond to criticism with sweeping reform—an effort which ultimately shattered on the resistance of U.S. Ambassador John Bolton.
In The Best Intentions, Traub recounts the dramatically entwined history of Kofi Annan and the UN from 1992 to the present. In Annan he sees a conscientious idealist given too little credit for advancing causes like humanitarian intervention and an honest broker crushed between American conservatives and Third Worldopponents—but also a UN careerist who has absorbed that culture and can not, in the end, escape its limitations.
The New York Times - Josef Joffe
Is the United Nations boring and irrelevant? This book certainly is not. Call the organization a "haven of hypocrites" or "humanity's best hope," tote up its many miseries and few glories. But if you want to understand this vexing creature with its 192 heads, The Best Intentions is one of the finest guides around, indeed, the best in recent memory…Traub, always the dispassionate analyst, neither condemns nor condones. His is a melancholy tale, beautifully written and meticulously researched—about a hero who was not so much flawed as indecisive, whose clout could never measure up to his lofty purpose. How could it? A secretary general is precisely what the title says: a secretary beholden to 192 bosses, all seeking power while pretending to serve the common good.
Library Journal
A contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, Traub assesses not only high-profile UN secretary-general Kofi Annan but also the problems facing the UN. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A heartbreaking book about a hardworking idealist's frustrated attempts to restore the stature of the cumbersome United Nations in a world dominated by "the preemptively belligerent America."New York Times Magazine contributor Traub (The Devil's Playground, 2004, etc.) offers a detailed account of Kofi Annan's 1992-96 tenure as head of UN peacekeeping and then as the Secretary-General whose battering from the Bush Administration during its invasion of Iraq sent him into "something like a nervous breakdown," and left the UN seriously weakened. The author depicts Annan as a modest and charming career civil servant. He joined the UN in 1962, taking a low-grade job in Geneva, and assumed his present leadership post in 1997, lionized as a peacemaker. After 9/11, things changed: The U.S. invaded Iraq without Security Council approval, and the UN's failure to find a multilateral solution underscored its seeming irrelevance in an era of conflicts involving stateless terrorists. Written with Annan's cooperation, the book traces the Nobel Peace Prize-winner's struggle to build consensus and achieve reforms in the face of U.S. indifference (often shading into outright hostility) and the scandal over corruption in the UN's Oil-For-Food program, which left him devastated. Traub's hundreds of interviews produce stories of well-intentioned bureaucrats caught up in endless politicking and paper-pushing; sharp portraits of ineffectual, careerist aides in the Renaissance court-like atmosphere of Annan's office on the 38th floor of the Secretariat Building; and many glimpses of the low-key Secretary-General in action as he searches for elusive common ground in meetings and on tours abroad. Annan sometimesseems emotionless to the point of being strange. He is unable to comfort a colleague upset by the deaths of 22 UN workers in Baghdad; he sits quietly, compulsively taking notes in a secret three-hour meeting called by former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke and other intimates to warn Annan that the UN's grave situation requires a complete management overhaul. The good news? "The UN will muddle along in the future."Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency
Table of Contents:
Preface xiPart I
A Greater Magna Carta... 3
A Gold Coast Man 29
Peace, Not Justice 44
The American Candidate 67
Kofi in the Lion's Den 83
Bosnia Never Again 102
The Exquisite Ironies of Benevolent Colonialism 124
Romancing Cousin Jesse 146
Who's Going to Run Afghanistan? 169
Saddam's Pyrrhic Victory 187
"What Did They Die For?" 212
Part II
The Security Council Fiddles While Darfur Burns 233
The Gentle King and His Court 255
Two Cheers-If That-for Diplomacy 266
Oil-for-Food: The Witch Hunt 281
Kofi Briefly Rescued by Disaster 305
Nice Guys Get Crushed 316
"They're Laughing at Us in Khartoum" 339
Oil-for-Food: The Nightmare 359
The Black Hole of Kinshasa 377
America's Interest in UN Reform Is...What, Exactly? 399
John Bolton's Nuclear Strategy 415
Model UN 445
Epilogue 453
Afterword 469
A Note on Sources 479
Acknowledgments 483
Index 485
New interesting book: Life and Death in the Third Reich or Unlimited Access
Who's Looking Out for You?
Author: Bill OReilly
Media powerhouse and expert critic Bill O'Reilly's most comprehensive book yet offers new insight into the current state of life in America. In examining the social, political, and economic aspects of our daily lives, O'Reilly exhausts every bureaucratic system to see what our higher-ups are doing to take care of us, and points out the people and institutions who are failing the average American. At the same time, he makes one of his most profound and daring journeys yet, as he ventures to question how much genuine altruism is left in a society that thrives on a competitive, increasingly self-indulgent ethos. With thoughtfulness and candor, O'Reilly targets our biggest problems, and offers sage advice on how to regain control and trust in these troubled times.
Publishers Weekly
The tough-talking, no-spin anchor of The O'Reilly Factor offers his many fans another no-holds-barred excoriation of the usual suspects-but also, surprisingly, some others. In his latest, the bestselling author (The No-Spin Zone) scrutinizes the forces at play in the lives of ordinary Americans, seeking to answer the question in the title. His conclusion: not the U.S. government; not the media; not the Catholic bishops ("elderly white men who have spent their lives playing politics and currying favor with the conservative zealots in the Vatican"). Other offenders include "antipolice minority `leaders' "; Hollywood moguls who put profit before public morality; lawyers eager to make a buck on the back of taxpayers and the justice system itself- and the list goes on. But this is not an exercise in complaint; in fact, it is the opposite. This surprisingly personal book gets even more personal in the last two chapters where O'Reilly provides examples of his own blunders and vulnerabilities on his path to success. In the last chapter, entitled "Here's to You," O'Reilly counsels his readers: take care of your mind and your body; read books; exercise; forgive yourself; be independent and practice tolerance. While he at times falls into clich and overly simplistic analysis, he manages to pull off an inspirational guide to life's most basic quandaries. O'Reilly has found a niche and continues to capitalize successfully on it. He is able to package conservative ideas so that they are palatable to a broader audience, and despite his confrontational, some might say merciless, style, he makes his readers and viewers feel that he is looking out for them. (On sale Sept. 23) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
O'Reilly stays mad. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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