UN-Truth

The Washington Post today carries an opinion piece on Kofi Annan’s term of office by William Shawcross, British former journalist and author of The Quality of Mercy, a great book about the limitations and contradictions of the international humanitarian effort to help Cambodians, who fled to Thailand during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, after suffering in isolation during the traumatic Khmer Rouge communitarian experiment, that followed the 1975 American pull-out from Viet Nam. 

William Shawcross’ most recent work, apparently, is “Allies — Why the West Had to Remove Saddam.”

The argument in this piece on Annan, however, is flawed — the failings of the United Nations are not only due to the Member States.  This is an easy answer, often given by top Annan aides (Mark Malloch Brown, Shashi Tharoor, Edward Mortimer, to name a few, who are responsible for William Shawcross’ access to Kofi Annan).  No, the UN failings are also the responsibility of UN officials, including Kofi Annan and his closest associates, and to the UN administration that manages, or mismanages, the Organization.   Were the 20 UN staff members who were killed in the bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 — sent there by Kofi Annan, who still mourns and deeply regrets their dying on his orders – were they really the best in the UN system, or is this just something we all say to pay tribute to their sacrifice?

Nevertheless, in the interest of seeing a fuller picture of the problems, here is today’s article in the Washington Post,  “Annan and the U.N.’s Limits”: by William Shawcross (Thursday, December 28, 2006; Page A27):

“Kofi Annan deserves a good sendoff. For 10 years he has persevered with unfailing grace in what really is ‘a job from hell.’

I am biased — I’ve admired Annan since the early 1990s, some years before he became secretary general of the United Nations. Like the U.S. government, I welcomed his replacing Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996. Annan had been the one U.N. official brave enough to give Washington the green light to bomb the Serbs to the negotiating table in the summer of 1995. His intervention then was crucial.

It is easy to forget now that Annan’s first five-year term was widely seen as a great success. He presented a wise, compassionate approach and a breath of fresh air. He also showed unprecedented honesty — commissioning independent inquiries into the disasters of Rwanda and Srebrenica and accepting all criticism from them, including criticism of himself.

Kofi Annan was (and is) pro-American, and he mended the United Nations’ relations with Congress. He persuaded international businesses to help promote development. He concentrated much attention on the ravages of HIV-AIDS.

Not surprisingly, he was reelected by acclamation in the middle of 2001. But then Sept. 11 changed everything. As Annan himself said, the world entered the 21st century through a gate of fire. That fire still rages, especially in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.

Unlike Annan, I was and remain in favor of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. But the Security Council was and remains divided on the whole Iraq issue. The United Nations being what it is, no secretary general could have ignored that division.

Tragically for Annan and the United Nations, more than 20 of his best people were brutally murdered in Baghdad by al-Qaeda in August 2003. This assault, together with the political divisions, have crippled the United Nations in Iraq ever since. But Annan insisted that the United Nations help stage the successful January 2005 election in which so many millions of Iraqis voted freely for the first time in their lives.

The U.N. role in Iraq has been further complicated, if not diminished, by the oil-for-food scandal. This was indeed a disaster; the secretariat was incompetent, a few officials behaved corruptly and the perversion of the program by Saddam Hussein (as Charles Duelfer showed in his magisterial Iraq Survey Group report) enabled the dictator to prop up the Iraqi economy in the last years of his misrule.

But it is wrong to blame all this on Annan — members of the Security Council, particularly France, Russia and China, were all busily corrupting the program for their own ends. Even the United States and Britain turned a blind eye to sanctions-busting when it helped their ally Jordan.

Annan tried hard to reform the U.N. system. He has had less success than he’d hoped. In the spring he devised a complicated reform plan that, though supported by John Bolton, then the U.S. ambassador, and agreed on by the Security Council, was scuttled at the last minute by the ‘Group of 77′ developing states. To put it crudely, too many ambassadors and their presidents were frightened of losing too many jobs for their ‘nieces’ in the cozy U.N. system. Annan was deeply disappointed. Blame the members, not him.

Annan has worked endlessly on myriad, often unseen problems. Traveling with him to countries around the world, I was astonished at the number of international calls he had to take daily from leaders begging for help in settling disputes. He dealt with such requests in a calm and conscientious manner that inspired confidence and conciliation.

Darfur has been an agony for Annan the past two years. I was with him in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in November; at a meeting of the Security Council’s ‘permanent five,’ he was desperate to get agreement to send a U.N. peacekeeping force into Darfur to stem the mass murders and ethnic cleansing promoted by the Sudanese government.

After a long day of negotiations, hopes rose that Sudan had finally agreed to Annan’s plan, but it was a trick: Soon after the meeting, Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, announced that he would allow no such thing.

The bottom line is that, like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and all too many other leaders of member states, Bashir is a gangster and a murderer. It is not Annan’s fault that the world has failed to confront Bashir effectively — the truth is that he has far too much support, tacit if not overt, among African, Arab and other governments. It’s the same with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and other despots.

Millions of people around the world place hope in the United Nations. It all too often disappoints. It does do vital things, but there is much it cannot do, and it is stuffed with cronyism and hypocrisy. It reflects the horrors of the world, as well as trying to keep those horrors at bay. Annan has dealt with such problems with more skill, patience and decency than any recent secretary general. If he was unable to create the decent, reformed, efficient and humane organization he sought, that is because far too few of its members want any such thing.”  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701385.html

Compare this, however, to an article about Gerald Ford’s Presidency, that also is published in the Washington Post today: “Moral Leadership” by Ron Nessen (Thursday, December 28, 2006; Page A27):

“One reason Gerald R. Ford was a good president was because he never wanted to be president.

After 25 years as a congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., he told his wife, Betty, that he was going to run for one more term in the House and then retire to spend more time with her and their children. Then, suddenly, he was appointed vice president (after Spiro Agnew’s resignation) and succeeded to the presidency (after Richard Nixon’s resignation).

Unlike politicians who carefully calculate for decades how their every word and deed will sound and look when they eventually run for the White House, Ford moved into the Oval Office without having his persona distorted by lust for the presidency.

And the public sensed this genuineness. What a relief to have a regular person as president, particularly after the imperial presidencies of Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson. Ford was ‘the man next door.’

After the resignation, it took the Nixons a few days to move their belongings out of the White House. It took a few more days to freshen up the paint in the second-floor living quarters. So for 10 days after he became president, Gerald Ford, Betty and their children Susan, Steve and Jack continued to live in their modest suburban rambler on Crown View Drive in Alexandria. I always thought: What a perfect symbol for an ordinary-guy president.

One day Ford’s dog, Liberty, made a mess on the rug in the Oval Office. A Navy steward rushed to clean it up. “I’ll do that,” Ford said. “No man should have to clean up after another man’s dog.” As I say, it was nice to have a regular person as president.

…One of Ford’s favorite sayings about the political and legislative debates in Washington was that “you can disagree without being disagreeable.” He not only said it, he lived it…
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…But as president, Gerald Ford did more than change the post-Watergate atmosphere in Washington. The Vietnam War ended during his presidency. By what he did and what he said after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Ford headed off a bitter postwar campaign of recrimination about “Who lost Vietnam?”

One day during that dark period, I walked into the Oval Office and showed Ford an Associated Press story reporting that the House had rejected a bill providing funds to help resettle hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who would probably be targets of imprisonment and execution by the victorious North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. I’d never heard Ford curse before, but he did that day when he read the story.

He undertook a public lobbying campaign, including visits to refugee camps in Arkansas and Florida, which turned around public and congressional opposition to helping the refugees. It was his greatest display of moral leadership.

Ford also had a knack for finding and recruiting talented people to serve in government.

Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state, gave a talk at the National Archives a few months ago assessing Ford’s presidency. Kissinger noted that judgments about events and leaders made in the heat of the moment often must be modified or reversed when those events and leaders are reassessed from the perspective of 30 years of subsequent history.

President Ford and his presidency are viewed much more favorably today than they were the day he left office. It’s good to know that he lived long enough to enjoy the reassessment.”  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701381.html

In the same edition of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward reports that “Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq” (Thursday, December 28, 2006; Page A01):  “Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. ‘I don’t think I would have gone to war,’ he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford ‘very strongly’ disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief
‘Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,’ Ford said. ‘And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.’
In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.
‘Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,’ Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a ‘duty to free people.’ But the former president said he was skeptical ‘whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.’ He added: ‘And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.’
The Ford interview — and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 — took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death. In the sessions, Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with key Bush advisers Cheney and Rumsfeld while expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.
‘He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,’ Ford said. ‘But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious’ as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s assertion that Cheney developed a ‘fever’ about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. ‘I think that’s probably true.’
Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. ‘I don’t think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.’
Ford had faced his own military crisis — not a war he started like Bush, but one he had to figure out how to end. In many ways those decisions framed his short presidency — in the difficult calculations about how to pull out of Vietnam and the challenging players who shaped policy on the war. Most challenging of all, as Ford recalled, was Henry A. Kissinger, who was both secretary of state and national security adviser and had what Ford said was ‘the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.’
‘I think he was a super secretary of state,’ Ford said, ‘but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend.’
In 1975, Ford decided to relieve Kissinger of his national security title. ‘Why Nixon gave Henry both secretary of state and head of the NSC, I never understood,’ Ford said. ‘Except he was a great supporter of Kissinger. Period.’ But Ford viewed Kissinger’s dual roles as a conflict of interest that weakened the administration’s ability to fully air policy debates. ‘They were supposed to check on one another.’
That same year, Ford also decided to fire Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger and replace him with Rumsfeld, who was then Ford’s White House chief of staff. Ford recalled that he then used that decision to go to Kissinger and say, ‘I’m making a change at the secretary of defense, and I expect you to be a team player and work with me on this’ by giving up the post of security adviser.
Kissinger was not happy. ‘Mr. President, the press will misunderstand this,’ Ford recalled Kissinger telling him. ‘They’ll write that I’m being demoted by taking away half of my job.’ But Ford made the changes, elevating the deputy national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to take Kissinger’s White House post.
Throughout this maneuvering, Ford said, he kept his White House chief of staff in the dark. ‘I didn’t consult with Rumsfeld. And knowing Don, he probably resented the fact that I didn’t get his advice, which I didn’t,’ Ford said. ‘I made the decision on my own.’
Kissinger remained a challenge for Ford. He regularly threatened to resign, the former president recalled. ‘Over the weekend, any one of 50 weekends, the press would be all over him, giving him unshirted hell. Monday morning he would come in and say, “I’m offering my resignation.” Just between Henry and me. And I would literally hold his hand. “Now, Henry, you’ve got the nation’s future in your hands and you can’t leave us now.” Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed, German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.’
Ford added, ‘Any criticism in the press drove him crazy.’ Kissinger would come in and say: ‘I’ve got to resign. I can’t stand this kind of unfair criticism.’ Such threats were routine, Ford said. ‘I often thought, maybe I should say: “Okay, Henry. Goodbye,” ‘ Ford said, laughing. ‘But I never got around to that.’
At one point, Ford recalled Kissinger, his chief Vietnam policymaker, as ‘coy.’ Then he added, Kissinger is a ‘wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class secretary of state. But Henry always protected his own flanks.’
Ford was also critical of his own actions during the interviews. He recalled, for example, his unsuccessful 1976 campaign to remain in office, when he was under enormous pressure to dump Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Republican ticket. Some polls at the time showed that up to 25 percent of Republicans, especially those from the South, would not vote for Ford if Rockefeller, a New Yorker from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, was on the ticket.
When Rockefeller offered to be dropped from the ticket, Ford took him up on it. But he later regretted it. The decision to dump the loyal Rockefeller, he said, was ‘an act of cowardice on my part.’
In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it’.”
Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701558.html

A columnist in Israel’s Haartetz newspaper, meanwhile, is calling Ford “The leader who saved Israel from Nixon”:  “WASHINGTON - Betty Ford, the President’s wife, dragged Israel’s Prime Minister onto the dance floor. Protesting that he did not know how to dance did nothing to save Yitzhak Rabin. Ford explained that she had taught worse dancers a few moves. Rabin was saved a minute later by secretary of state Henry Kissinger who cut in. ‘I will be eternally grateful for that small mercy,’ Rabin wrote. ‘If he would not have done anything else for Israel, Kissinger is worthy of praise for saving me from that embarrassment.’

The dialogue between Israel and the United States deteriorated following Rabin’s visit in September of 1974. Gerald Ford will always be remembered as the president who imposed a ‘reassessment’ of the relationship. Only history will tell whether the change of leadership in Washington - from Richard Nixon, impeached over the Watergate scandal, to his deputy, who died yesterday at age 93 - saved Israel from an equally stern president. On the eve of his impeachment, Nixon wanted to press Israel even more than Ford, and would have certainly done so more efficiently…The strained relations between Ford and Rabin, which never reached the level of warmth shared by their predecessors, Nixon and Golda Meir, was only a symptom of the diplomatic dispute. The Ford Administration wanted to strike up an agreement between Israel and Jordan, and achieve progress with Egypt. Rabin was a weak prime minister domestically, and was hard pressed to meet Ford’s wishes…Ford had no real diplomatic experience. Nixon appointed him vice president when Spiro Agnew was caught in a corruption scandal - and when the president stepped down in the wake of Watergate, Ford became president for nearly 900 days. In any case, most of his work as president was cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor. Yesterday, America remembered him mostly for pardoning Nixon - a decision originally said to have destroyed the few chances he had of winning the 1976 elections, and later lauded as a courageous, appropriate move. His March 1975 announcement that the U.S. policy in the Middle East would undergo a ‘reassessment’ was not seen in similar light. More than anything this was an expression of frustration over the failure of Kissinger’s ’shuttle diplomacy’ in bringing about further achievements in Arab-Israeli relations following initial successes.  Kissinger, who ran Ford’s policy and basically accused Israel of intransigence, encountered a crisis of confidence with Rabin. The prime minister thought Kissinger was lying to him - and the secretary of state was indeed lying. He had promised Rabin that he would not blame Israel for the crisis but did so anyway, also in his private briefings to the president. Ford was ‘mad as hell,’ he says. A threatening letter to Israel was among the worse ever sent: ‘Failure of the negotiations will have a far-reaching impact on the region and on our relations,’ the president wrote.  But his letter resulted in a humiliating letter from 76 Senators, demanding that the president ‘make it clear that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firm with Israel.’ They taught him a lesson on the limits of his political power. Still, Ford managed to make some gains, in spite of the limitations imposed on him and his secretary of state by hawkish and dovish quarters alike. The government of Israel proved sufficiently flexible to allow a further agreement in Sinai, and used the American desire for a peace agreement to squeeze further aid from the U.S. One can argue that he was the President first paving the way toward an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement.” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=806601

Filed under: Cambodia, Journalism and Journalists, Kofi Annan Watch, UN Secretary-General, Viet Nam