A time-sensitive read: Kofi Annan's Interventions

This book has been on my list for some time now, and when Kofi Annan himself came and lectured on my first day of classes at Uppsala University less than a month ago, I was absolutely amazed by this man's combination of candor and composure. I picked up his autobiography of his years as head of UN Peacekeeping Operations (1993-1996) and then as Secretary-General (1997-2006), during which time he was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in tandem with the UN itself. The book, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, is a concise, focused read which dives right at the heart of the multiple international failures of the 1990s and early 2000s: Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq... Kofi gives a blunt, refreshingly-sharp critique of the shortcomings of the United Nations as a cohesive actor in conflict prevention, an issue he has made it his business to remedy over the past twenty years.

I can't speak highly enough of this book. As a Peace and Conflict Studies student with a basic knowledge of the topics and players in major UN debates of my lifetime, my knowledge was completely uprooted by Annan's summation of the conflicts from the perspective of the UN. Not only does he present the issues in an incredibly fluent and concise manner (a testament to his natural ability to zero-in on the root of a conflict, the place where diplomacy must be targeted), he also peels back the complex layers and interactive structures of the UN to easily engage the reader with the interplay of countless nuanced exchanges between many, many actors over endless years of conflict after conflict. In the throes of what was no doubt one of the most challenging jobs in the world, Annan emerges as a lucid, forward-thinking individual, one who was always attune to the bigger picture, even as actors (often the US) barraged the UN to make narrow-minded and thoughtlessly reactionary decisions in the face of global trauma.

This is a book that you can open to any page and find immense wisdom. I would love to quote many, many of his paragraphs, but I would like to mention this one, because it really gets at the heart of why the UN fails to act in the face of crisis. It's not because they don't want to or don't have the ability to; rather, it's the very nature of the organization, i.e. that it is reliant on the whims and decisions of the actors that constitute it. The UN is not an independent force, and this is something that we tend to forget. "The UN" is a term for the consensus (or at least the bargaining table) of every country in the world (except Kosovo, Taiwan, the Vatican, and Palestine).  Failure to act on the part of the UN is merely a failure for the broader international community to act.

"Contrary to what many suspect, the UN has few resources of its own.  For a peace operation, I had to go to the troop-contributing countries and ask for peacekeepers.  For development assistance and humanitarian relief, I had to go to the donor governments." (140)

With events unfolding in Syria, this is a very timely book to read - Kofi Annan leaves off in this memoir with mentions of the escalating tensions in Syria.  I would recommend reading it now before it becomes outdated by a barrage of new developments in the Middle East.

One last point I want to make about this book: he gives a thorough account of the Iraq War from where he sat as Secretary-General while the US chose to commit an illegal act of invading Iraq without the approval of the Security Council.  In light of everything Annan writes up to this point (he saves the Iraq War for last), in light of his descriptions of how painstakingly the UN had to be restructured in order to step out of the Cold War era and into our world of contemporary armed conflict (most of which is actually intrastate in nature), this decision to flout the UN had terrible ramifications that continue to be seen and felt, even a decade later.

"By behaving the way it did, the United States invited the perception among many in the world--including many long-time allies--that it was becoming a greater threat to global security than anything Saddam could muster.  This was a self-inflicted wound of historic proportions--and one that did immense, and possibly lasting, damage to U.S. standing in the world.  Abu Ghraib did not come out of a vacuum, and neither did Guantanamo.  The way they both ran counter to the principles of the rule of law has done incalculable damage to the global struggle for human rights." (366)

The sad fact is that Kofi Annan had been devoting nearly all of his time to engaging in diplomatic processes all over the Middle East -- with Iraq, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Hizbollah, you name it!  And real strides were actually being made!  The US invasion of Iraq put pretty much all of this to a halt, delaying peace in the Middle East by years, if not decades.  This isn't old news; the consequences are apparent today, in the US's less-than-amicable relations with many Middle East leaders.

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All-in-all, I was absolutely riveted by this book - it's a remarkable historical artifact, going through all the major conflicts of my lifetime (I'm 22) and discussing the ways in which the UN has adapted for the better (while still pointing out where the organization has still to better itself).