The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: peacekeeping officials, peacekeeping department, outcome document, Security Council, United States, Kofi Annan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A heartbreaking book about a hardworking idealist ... " -- Kirkus

"Traub brings [the UN] to life with a highly readable account." -- The Economist

...engaging, nuanced and often fascinating...proof that the phrase "U.N. page-turner" is not hopelessly oxymoronic. -- Niall Stanage, The Wall Street Journal

...largely focused on Kofi Annan's decade long tenure as the U.N.'s secretary general...is engaging, nuanced, and often fascinating... -- Leisure & Arts, Bookshelf, November 8, 2006

Is the United Nations boring and irrelevant? This book certainly is not...a melancholy tale, beautifully written and meticulously researched. -- Josef Joffe, The New York Times Book Review

The Best Intentions is...one of the most definitive and accessible studies of the UN and its chief executive ever published. -- Stephen Schlesinger, Foreign Affairs

The book will no doubt go down as the best account of Annan's tenure during...the Bush Administration. -- Nancy Soderberg, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

The book works, not just as a portrait of Annan but as one of the U.N. itself. -- Salon.com Books, December 21, 2006

With a wide canvas and fine brush, "The Best Intentions" details a record Traub believes places Annan on the short list of great secretary generals...Traub credits him with grappling honestly with...the recurring nightmares of the post-Cold War... -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, December 3, 2006

Review

"We watched as the UN failed the people of Iraq in the Oil for Food scandal. We watched as the UN failed innocent people in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur in the Sudan, and in the Congo. And we are watching the results of UN failure in South Lebannon. Jim Traub supplies the critical insights for anyone seeking to make sense of the challenges we face."   —Newt Gingrich

 

"Kofi Annan is, without question, the most significant UN Secretary General in 45 years. He is also a complex man occupying a very complicated post. To this important subject, James Traub brings great intelligence, balance, and insight. The result is a book well worth reading."  —Fareed Zakaria, author of The Future of Freedom

 

"Some want the world to be reformed by getting rid of the UN. That would be catastrophic. What the world needs is the UN reformed. In this book, James Traub tells the story of how difficult that is – and why it is so important." —Bono

                                                                                                                         On The Devil's Playground:

 

“Both an engaged civics lesson and a work of social history . . . on every page you learn something.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

 

“A shrewd and rollicking account.” —Time

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374182205
• ISBN-13: 978-0374182205
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #600,629 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinarily detailed reporting, cannily written, November 9, 2006

By	Pranay Gupte "www.pranaygupte.com" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been a longtime fan of the writings of James Traub, so my view of his books is obviously somewhat biased. Nevertheless, I was astonished by the depth of his reporting about the United Nations and Kofi Annan. In view of the immense access that the U.N.'s outgoing secretary general gave him, Traub would have been surely tempted to write a hagiography. But he shows himself to be the consummate professional. This book is as much about Annan's setbacks and mistakes as it is about his triumphs. If Annan is as fair-minded as he's reported to be, then he is bound to be impressed by Traub's efforts. I doubt there's ever been such an extensively detailed work about the U.N., that beleaguered 192-nation body that has so much potential and yet has been handicapped by the mismanagement, corruption and straying from its mission of promoting global peace and security, and sustainable economic development. Traub captures it all -- the daily drama of development, the anguish of peacekeeping forces, the thankless grind of the U.N.'s field workers, the haughtiness of some of the organization's top povertycrats. Traub's narrative also makes for marvelous reading -- it's an unputdownable book. I predict that even those who might not be necessarily friends or critics of multilateral diplomacy will enjoy "The Best Intentions."

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely, Relevant, Useful, Incomplete, Well-Presented, Lacking Notes & Larger Context, November 29, 2006

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

I give this book five stars instead of four, which I would normally assign, because the shortfalls in the book, most especially a lack of context, notes, and additional detail, are out-weighed by the timeliness, relevance, utility, and able original presentation.

This is an important book for our time. Indeed, I put it down thinking that the author has presented us with a meal of worms--and only those visible at the top of the planter box--but when you are starving--when there is no other viable alternative for peacekeeping--worms can be appetizing.

Before I present some details that made it to my fly-leaf notes, a few "big points" that stayed with me:

1) UN is a grotesque failure in many many ways, but also the closest thing we have to a viable global enterprise, hence, a good starting point for all its flaws.

2) Not addressed at all in the book, spoken of only in passing, the rather important point that most UN agencies are not at all subordinate to nor responsive to the Secretary General and his Secretariat.

3) The UN suffers from two major impediments: first, that the contributing or Member nations do not really want it to be effective, and ham-string it, particularly the Security Council members, although the author is vitriolic on China and Russia vetoing votes, while strangely silent on the US and its constant veto; and second, that personal relations built over decades far out-weight actual job titles and responsibilities, and can be blamed for many things including the Oil for Food corruption nightmare.

4) The author gently explores three major alternatives to the current situation:

4a) the division of the UN into a global body for mobilizing resources and consensus; and a separate global police or gendarme force. I would note, with a genuflection toward Oakley et all in "Policing the New World Disorder," that this needs to be standing force or at least an earmarked force, ideally led by the Dutch, which trains together and has inter-operable concepts, doctrines, and equipment. See also the edited work, "Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future."

4b) a Democracies body, one that purportedly brings together democracies and ends the domination of the UN by third-rate third-world countries, many managed by dictators and corrupt leaders who loot their commonwealths far more aggressively than Wall Street loots America and the rest of the world. This fails when one realizes that most democracies really are not...

4c) Regional networks that bring to bear regional concerns and resources in the context of the varied global agencies. This has some real possibilities, especially if information is shared broadly to provide a "ground truth" that is undeniable. I am reminded of J. F. Rischard's excellent recommendations in High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

There is a useful history of key Secretary Generals, one that makes the point that Dag Hammarskjöld was an anomaly, and Annan, for all his flaws, may be one of the few to rise to the Hammarskjöld level of effectiveness..

The author provides a useful history of UN ineffectiveness and UN successes. I certainly recommend that this book be read in tandem with William Shawcross's Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict Interestingly, Shawcross and US diplomat Holbrooke were the only two personal guests at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony.

This book is severely lacking in two ways:

1) It really does not communicate the complexity of the over-all UN archipelago of fiefdoms, most of which are not responsive to the Secretary General, nor does it adequately describe the many problems for the UN created by Third World and other blocs. In this book, China, Russia, and to a much lesser extent than it merits, the US, are the evil doers.

2) It completely misses the role that multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information sharing, what the Swedes call M4IS, can play in bringing disparate groups to the table. The word "intelligence" does not appear in the index nor as far as I can tell, in the book itself. Overall the book focuses excessively on the Oil for Food scandal, and on Darfur, correctly making the point that Darfur was anticipated, that the Member nations chose to pay lip service to the problem through UN "deliberations," but the book fails to point out that Darfur is one of 17 genocides on-going, and it fails to put the Secretary General's mission in the larger context of what I call the [ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers]. See The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption for large context.

The author concludes that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have weakened the UN; and that most of the world does not see terrorism as a threat. Indeed, since this was written, the High-Level Threat Panel places terrorism as ninth on a list of ten high-level threats.

Throughout the book the role of the US as the 900 lb bully is the subtle and sometimes not so subtle sub-text. My own view, formed by my actual experience as well as my broad reading in non-fiction, is that the US, for all its good, is also the single most negative force on the planet, simply because it persists in virtual colonialism, unilateral militarism inclusive of 750 secret and not secret bases world-wide, and its tolerance for predatory immoral capitalism that has created a class war in which US financial and corporate elites bribe foreign elites, and they both destroy their own middle classes while looting all relatively defenseless economies. See the books Confessions of an Economic Hit Man; The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy; and Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.

There is PLENTY of money to address the ten high-level threats with twelve intelligent inter-related policies that help the eight challengers avoid American mistakes that today produce a third of the waste on the planet while consuming a third of the energy. What we need now, in support of our new Secretary General, is a commitment to implement ALL of the Brahimi Report recommendations, inclusive of a Director of Global Intelligence (Decision-Support), perhaps sponsored by the UN Foundation, so that every Member nation, and every non-governmental organization, might operate in a transparent, accountable, sensible context. See Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future and my essays on "Virtual Intelligence" and on "Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War."

3.0 out of 5 stars Profiles of diplomacy, September 12, 2009

By	Newton Ooi (Phoenix, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This book follows the career of Kofi Annan from his days as a foreign student in America to his term as UN secretary general. The author, thru interviews of Annan and those he dealt with, uses Annan's career to trace the history of the UN from its inception at the end of WWII to its impotence at the onrush of American power after the 9/11 attacks. The book's story is told chronologically, and lays out the complex, and often hidden relationships between the UN's career bureaucrats, and member states like the US, Russia, China, etc... Included in this story are many of the key issues the UN has tackled over the past 5 decades; such as the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, Saddam Hussein and the 2 Iraq wars, possible expansion of the permanent Security Council, and the North vs South dichotomy. All of these struggles are told thru the career of Kofi Annan; how he dealt with them, he he was affected by them, and sometimes, how he was defeated by them. But the climax of the book is best showed by the front cover; a polite, unassuming black man who has seen too much of the world getting browbeaten by a loud white man who wants to take over the world.

The principal drawback of the book is the over-emphasis of the role of nations, and the minimal mention of the role of NGO's and corporations. Groups like the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and various religious missionary groups all get short-thrifted by this book. And corporations are almost non-existent. This is a big hole in the book's treatment as many countries' domestic and foreign policies are driven by corporations. So overall, an OK book.