The Best Intentions

by James Traub

A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, widely counted one of the greatest UN Secretary Generals, was nearly hounded from office by scandal. Indeed, both Kofi Annan and the institution he incarnates were so deeply shaken after the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq in the face of UN opposition that critics, and even some friends, began asking whether this sixty-year-old experiment in global policing has outlived its usefulness. Journalist Traub recounts the dramatically entwined history of Annan and the UN from 1992 to 2006. In Annan he sees a conscientious idealist given too little credit for advancing causes like humanitarian intervention, and an honest broker crushed between American conservatives and Third World opponents--but also a UN careerist who has absorbed that culture and can not, in the end, escape its limitations.--From publisher description.