Paving the Road to Hell: The Failure of U.N. Peacekeeping

The United Nations started the 1990s with such high hopes. With the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that had paralyzed the Security Council had become a thing of the past, supposedly freeing the U.N. to become more assertive. The Gulf War, the U.N.'s second-ever military victory, seemed to vindicate those hopes -- even though, as in the Korean War, the baby-blue banner was used as a mere flag of convenience for an American-led alliance. President Bush spoke of a "new world order." Candidate Clinton talked about giving the United Nations more power and even its own standing military force.

It is hard to find any U.S. officials making similar suggestions today, only a decade later. They have been chastened, presumably, by the U.N.'s almost unrelieved record of failure in its peacekeeping missions.

The United Nations itself has recently released reports documenting two of its worst stumbles. According to these confessions, U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda stood by as Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi. In Bosnia, the U.N. declared safe areas for Muslims but did nothing to secure them, letting the Serbs slaughter thousands in Srebrenica. The organization's meddling was worse than useless: its blue-helmeted troops were used as hostages by the Serbs to deter a military response from the West. Presumably, Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- who was head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping department at the time -- hopes that an institutional mea culpa now will wipe the slate clean and allow the organization to play a more vigorous role in the future.

The arrival of Deliver Us From Evil, a new book by British journalist William Shawcross, provides a good opportunity to ponder whether this is a realistic expectation. Shawcross presents a highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot, chronicle of U.N. diplomacy and humanitarian interventions in the past decade. Though predisposed to favor U.N. peacekeeping -- much of this book is written from the viewpoint of Annan, with whom the author traveled the world -- Shawcross is too honest a reporter to gloss over its failures. He even concedes that humanitarian aid may sometimes do more harm than good by prolonging a war.

BLAME GAMES

Despite the failures he chronicles, however, Shawcross' faith in U.N. peacekeeping -- and in Annan -- does not appear to have been seriously shaken. Although the book is generally sober, at points Shawcross gives in to giddiness, as when he describes the secretary-general as "the world's 'secular pope'" and "the repository of hope and the representative of such civilized standards of international behavior as we have been able to devise." At another point, Shawcross quotes (with no discernible irony) a U.N. official who describes the peacekeeping mission to Cambodia as "a model and shining example" because of the election staged there in 1993 -- never mind that Hun Sen promptly usurped power after losing at the ballot box.

Wherever possible, Shawcross blames such messes on the permanent members of the Security Council, whom he indicts for blocking the expansion of these missions. He dutifully quotes U.N. bureaucrats who complain that they did the best they could with inadequate resources, and he suggests they be given more support in the future. He's being too kind by half.

The failures of the United Nations should not be blamed just on the great powers. They owe as much to the mindset of U.N. administrators, who think that no problem in the world is too intractable to be solved by negotiation. These mandarins fail to grasp that men with guns do not respect men with nothing but flapping gums. A good example of this incomprehension was Annan's opera bouffe negotiations with Saddam Hussein. In 1998, Annan undertook shuttle diplomacy to Baghdad, reached a deal with Saddam to continue weapons inspections, and declared him "a man I can do business with." Almost immediately Saddam flouted his agreement with Annan. But even then the secretary-general told Shawcross, "I'm not convinced that massive use of force is the answer. Bombing is a blunt instrument."

Annan has actually been more pragmatic than many of his predecessors. But his outlook is inevitable in anyone who has spent years working at Turtle Bay. Just as the U.S. Marine Corps breeds warriors, so the U.N.'s culture breeds conciliators.

A large part of the problem is that Annan and his staff work not for the world's people but for their 188 (and counting) governments. Annan proclaimed last fall that sovereignty is on the decline -- and so it is, everywhere except at the U.N. There, at least in the General Assembly, all regimes, whether democratic or despotic, have an equal vote. Annan and other employees must be careful not to unduly offend any member state, and so they wind up adopting a posture of neutrality among warring parties, even when one side (such as Serbia or Iraq) is clearly in the wrong.

When the United Nations does use force, the results are often pathetic. The various national contingents that make up U.N. peacekeeping operations -- Bangladeshis, Bulgarians, Brazilians, and the like -- are chosen not for martial prowess but because their governments are willing to send them, often for no better reason than to collect a daily stipend. The quality of these outfits varies widely: Shawcross writes, for instance, that the Bulgarians in Cambodia were "said to be more interested in searching for sex than for cease-fire violations." Trying to coordinate all these units, with their incompatible training, procedures, and equipment (to say nothing of languages), makes a mockery of the principle of "unity of command." Little wonder that blue helmets strike no fear in the hearts of evildoers.