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Once the Cold War ended, so did the global management assured by its protagonists. Meanwhile, the illusion that the U.N. could be effective by itself had taken hold. The puppeteers had left the scene, but a performance was still demanded by the deluded and promised by the puppets themselves. For example, one decisive cause of Bosnia's tragedy was that, when U.N. peacekeeping troops arrived, the Bosnian population really believed the troops would keep the peace, not realizing that without superpowers to impose their will on the warring parties, the U.N. would only stand by to watch their suffering -- when it was not appeasing their tormentors, not to mention the smuggling and sexual commerce that were the chief activities of several national contingents.

Vieira de Mello states that I neglected to mention the wars in Namibia, El Salvador, and Mozambique, all of which ended through negotiations, rather than through conclusive wars. Really? True, there were negotiations in which the U.N. played a large role alongside others, such as Rome's Community of San Egidio and less-dubious NGOs. But as I noted, South Africa's war with the South West Africa People's Organisation was finally stopped by U.S. pressure, against the background of the Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola. As for El Salvador, its guerrilla war did end through negotiation -- but only after the insurgents were denied any chance of winning by the increasingly strong army and the Defensa Civil militia, conjoined with the diminishing hope of Sandinista-Cuban-Soviet assistance. Only then did the insurgents want to try the ballot box instead of the gun, but they were defeated electorally as well.

As for Mozambique, the government's rival -- the Mozambique National Resistance (MNR) -- was born as a Rhodesian covert operation and lived on as a South African proxy. Once the MNR's creator had disappeared and its replacement patron cut off further support, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) won the war. Only then did undoubtedly useful mediation play its small role; so that too was a war ended by victory. The rest of Vieira de Mello's contentions can be answered by my response to Crocker, especially in the case of Sierra Leone, whose own war was inconclusive because, amid many atrocities against civilians, it was hardly fought by the supposed combatants. Outside multilateral intervention was notably ineffectual.

Vieira de Mello notes that "U.N. officials in such places as eastern Angola, northern Sierra Leone, and the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo face the fact that rebels fight not for victory but because fighting itself offers power and wealth." U.N. officials may "face the fact" but can do nothing about it, other than to legitimize grotesque entities that call themselves states because a U.N. seat has their name on it. Those officials are not earning their keep, because they neither kill rebels nor help them win on the sound calculation that war itself is more savage than the most savage of belligerents.

Edward N. Luttwak

Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies