by Kofi Annan
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On the ground in Iraq, the costs of the war could be measured in the more than one hundred thousand civilian lives lost in the turmoil following the invasion. Internationally, the war resulted in broken relations and hardened animosities, but also in the damage to the personal integrity and the standing of some of the principal players involved. No one endured this passage more painfully or publicly than Colin Powell, who would ultimately resign after the Bush administration had exploited, and exhausted, his stature. And no leader would carry with him the consequences of the Iraq War more lastingly than Tony Blair.
“Yo, Blair, how’re you doing?” As soon as I read these first words of the exchange between U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair captured by a rogue microphone at the July 2006 G8 summit in St. Petersburg, I thought of Blair, and knew he had to be cringing. Offering to travel to the Middle East, he told Bush that he was happy to leave immediately to try to reduce tensions. When Bush replied that his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would be going soon, Blair remarked that he could prepare the way for her diplomacy. The aide who handed me the transcript of the exchange said I should read on. They had been speaking about me, it turned out—and not in flattering terms.
I arrived at the G8 summit four days into the raging war between Israel and Hizbollah. Hizbollah had triggered the war when it fired rockets at Israeli border towns before crossing the Lebanese border to attack an Israeli patrol, taking two of its personnel hostage. This provoked a heavy military response by Israel against the militant group, as well as against the Lebanese state and the country’s infrastructure as a whole. I was determined to press for a cessation of hostilities and argue the case for the deployment of an international force as a condition for a durable peace. I knew I had annoyed at least one of the leaders there by asking Russian president Vladimir Putin to change the agenda and allow me to address the key session of the summit. As Bush and I engaged in a charged and pointed debate about my argument in front of the other leaders—with only France’s president Jacques Chirac joining in at the very end of the session—it was clear that Bush saw this as a simple matter of good versus evil. He was blunter still with Blair. “What about Kofi?” Bush had continued, according to the transcript. “I don’t like his cease-fire plan . . . His attitude is basically cease fire and everything sorts out . . . What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s all over . . . I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.”
Now I wish that I—or anyone—could simply “make something happen” with just a phone call. And while the U.S. policy of isolating Syria meant that I was one of few global leaders communicating with the Syrian leadership, getting a solution would take more than just a conversation. Given the complex set of interests and motivations in Syria—and among its neighbors, including Israel—this was a three-dimensional chess game played between the wiliest and most mutually distrustful of powers.
In fact, the Lebanon war was not just a wrenching tragedy for the Lebanese and Israelis. It was—in its tangled and bloody roots, its complex regional character, and its carefully UN-negotiated conclusion—a reflection of those forces of global order and disorder that I had been wrestling with throughout my decade as UN secretary-general. Intervention in long-standing conflicts; the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty; the role of peacekeeping; the place of the UN in the era of American dominance; the emergence of nonstate actors engaged in asymmetric conflict; the personal shuttle-diplomacy of a UN secretary-general in a fragmenting world—each of these was at stake in the Lebanon war. A simple battle between good and evil it was not.
For Blair, however, this conflict—no less than Iraq—was refracted through his lens of a meta-conflict between modernity and the medieval, between tolerant secularism and radical Islam. We had met privately in St. Petersburg before the formal summit session, and when I told him that the G8 statement had been too weak and too vague to make any difference on the ground, he replied coolly that the question was not whether Israel could be convinced to cease fire today, but rather in “ten days or two weeks.” Two weeks? I gave him an astonished look. His only response was that the conditions for a cessation of hostilities were not yet in place. This was not the Blair with whom I had agreed so passionately about the moral necessity of a humanitarian intervention to halt the Serbian attacks on the Kosovar Albanians in 1999—a stand that compelled me to override my own commitment to Security Council authorization of the use of force, and which cost me greatly with major powers, including Russia and China. Something had changed in Blair, and with it, I felt, his ability to act as a credible mediator in this conflict.
I was concerned with the scale and scope of Israel’s retaliation from the outset. Of course, the Israelis were justified in responding. Any nation, when attacked, has a right to defend itself. Israeli positions had been raided across an internationally recognized border. And I had personally certified the Blue Line in 2000 after working closely with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to enable his withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon after an eighteen-year occupation. But Israel’s justified defense of its borders rapidly became about something far greater, and far more difficult to achieve—namely, the destruction of a popular guerrilla organization with ample means of survival and retaliation.
On the day of the attack, I told Condoleeza Rice that I feared Israel would soon discover the limits to what could be achieved by force. There had to be a political agreement, a political understanding, I argued. Hizbollah was an organization with deep roots in Lebanese society and represented many long-standing, popular local grievances. It could not be disarmed by military means alone. But Israeli leader Ehud Olmert would have none of it. In my call with the prime minister the next day, he said that Israel was “not going to stop any military operation against Hizbollah,” but rather was going to “intensify it.”
Olmert’s demands were, in principle, legitimate: a release of the Israeli soldiers captured in the raid, withdrawal from the border, and the complete disarmament of Hizbollah as called for in UN Security Council resolution 1559. That did not mean, however, that they were obtainable through war. Indeed, everything we knew about the history of guerrilla warfare—in the region and around the world—suggested that there would ultimately have to be a negotiated solution, no matter how long or relentlessly Israel struck Lebanese targets.
Insisting on these conditions being met even before agreeing to a cessation of hostilities was a recipe for war without end. This much I knew from the first hours of the conflict, and over the next three weeks I took this message to anyone with power to influence the parties. Ten years of painful, drawn-out negotiations with the Palestinians and Israelis had taught me a grim lesson about the futility of killing off the first stages of a settlement between mortal foes.
Israel was already under siege on a second front, Gaza, where Hamas had attacked an Israeli border post two weeks earlier, killing two soldiers and kidnapping a young corporal, Gilad Shalit. An Israeli leader without a military background, Olmert needed to demonstrate decisiveness and strength. And ample license was given. The United States, along with the United Kingdom, took the view that Hizbollah had given the Israelis a unique opportunity to crush what had become a state within a state in Lebanon. Washington appeared to have decided that its primary responsibility in the early stages of the conflict was to buy time for the Israeli Air Force to inflict what it hoped would be a strategic defeat on the movement.
For an organization like Hizbollah, mere survival means victory. Ever since its founding in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizbollah had become part of the fabric of Lebanese society—whether one liked it or not. And I made clear my own disapproval when I spoke to the Security Council one week into the conflict and condemned Hizbollah’s “deliberate targeting of Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapo
ns.” I concluded that “whatever other agendas they may serve, Hizbollah’s actions, which it portrays as defending Palestinian and Lebanese interests, in fact do neither. On the contrary, they hold an entire nation hostage.”
By not losing, Hizbollah was winning. And for Israel, much more than another battlefield victory had been gambled. The essential myth of Israel’s invincibility—its strategic deterrence of its Arab neighbors—was now at risk. As its military commanders and political leadership came to recognize their miscalculation, their tactics became ever more desperate. Over the following three weeks, Israel carried out a widespread air campaign stretching from suspected Hizbollah positions in the south to the suburbs of Beirut and every major infrastructure artery, including bridges, roads, and air and sea ports. The state of Lebanon was being crippled, and more than one thousand civilians were killed—without, however, putting a halt to Hizbollah’s indiscriminate rocket attacks. During the same period, the group fired thousands of rockets, hitting targets as far as Haifa, and forced more than a million Israelis into shelters night after terrifying night.
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In Lebanon, Israeli and U.S. policymakers had attempted to change the country’s politics through military force. I had, in my own way, been disabused of the notion that the international community could fully understand the forces at play in such societies. In 2000, I was visiting Islamabad on a long-planned trip to Pakistan that coincided with the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. There I met with the man who represented the Taliban to outsiders as its foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil. I was staying at the Marriott Hotel (which, in 2008, was destroyed in an al Qaeda bombing), and as the Taliban delegation entered my suite, I knew that we were dealing with an entirely new phenomenon in international affairs.
Six young men, several of them barely out of their twenties, bearded and wearing traditional Afghan robes, walked in, seemingly engaging in their first meeting with a diplomat of any kind. A few appeared barely to understand even the translation of the conversation, and Mutawakil himself had only one, tellingly bizarre, reply to my different appeals for a halt to the destruction of the Buddhas: “Under our laws, nothing we do can be considered illegal.” And when I warned them that their behavior could lead to further sanctions, including a ban on international travel by their leaders, Mutawakil looked puzzled and responded: “Travel? Why would we travel? We don’t want to go anywhere.”
The Buddhas were only an element of our meeting, however. Having long played a critical role in providing humanitarian assistance to the Afghan population, the UN needed assurances that we could continue our work without being attacked. Mutawakil, in this case, pledged his support, and this gave me the opening to raise what I knew would be a sensitive issue—just how sensitive I was about to discover.
I had been asked—in a highly confidential request—to inquire of Mutawakil about the presence in Afghanistan of a man still in those days referred to as UBL—Osama bin Laden. Were there any circumstances under which the Taliban leadership would agree to an exchange involving this individual? I made clear that this was a high priority and that meaningful goodwill would accrue to the Taliban if such an arrangement could be arrived at. From Mutawakil’s response—and a look that combined fear and outrage in equal measure—the extent of UBL’s influence in Afghanistan became clear. There was no question whatsoever of an exchange involving their “honored guest,” he said, as directly as he could manage. The meeting came to an abrupt end, but the memory stayed with me until that fateful day in September 2001 when UBL changed the world.
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The United Nations played a critical role in the Lebanon conflict from the outset. The raid that triggered the hostilities was across a UN-delineated and UN-sanctioned border. UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1680 had previously mandated the central conditions for peace in Lebanon: withdrawal of Syrian forces, disarming of Hizbollah, and government control over all Lebanese territory. Once fighting erupted anew, it was clear that any solution required the authority of the Security Council and the means to impose its will.
To provide the Israelis with confidence that their withdrawal would not simply be followed by a return of Hizbollah forces to their prior positions, I needed to create a new, strengthened peacekeeping force that could end the attacks across the border. Rice—caught between Washington’s intent to buy Israel further time for its bombing campaign and her recognition of the damage done to the position of the United States by continuing to stand by while Lebanon was being hit—called me to suggest a two-stage deployment of forces. First, she argued, one could have a “humanitarian stage” with relief workers deployed alongside Israeli forces as Hizbollah withdrew. Then, one could have the international force come in to boost the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
This was yet another attempt at conditioning a halt to the violence, a sequencing that I knew from long experience would not work. Citing the history of the UN’s efforts in Africa and the Balkans, I told Rice that all sides would have to move in parallel—Israel, Hizbollah, and the international forces all taking new, mutually acceptable positions simultaneously.
I had not come to this conclusion lightly. I knew the cost of sending peacekeepers into the field without the mandate, resources, leadership, or moral confidence to succeed. I had seen with my own eyes what failure looked like in lives destroyed and hopes shattered. On my watch as under-secretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations, the UN lived through some of the most traumatic experiences in its history.
In one case, Bosnia, three years of brutally intimate civil war challenged the UN to see beyond its traditional notions of neutrality to distinguish good from evil, aggressor from victim. We failed, and the massacre at Srebrenica became an indelible stain. In another case, Rwanda, a lone voice on the ground—one of our own commanders—warned of a calamity to come, but at headquarters in New York the memory of Somalia defined our decision making, and three months later, after the genocide had started, the UN’s key member states withdrew the few forces left in the country.
But for the UN, especially, this was only part of the picture. Entering any arena of conflict, with its blue helmets and white vehicles and a flag symbolizing far more powerfully than any words shelter from the storm, the UN was making a solemn pledge: we have come to keep the peace. This was our commitment, and perhaps our greatest failure was never fully to grasp the enormity of this obligation. To a man, woman, or child for whom the presence of a blue helmet is all that lies between safety and certain death, talk of limited mandates, inadequate means, and under-resourced missions—however accurate—is, at best, beside the point, at worst, a betrayal.
As secretary-general, I was determined that we would acknowledge these realities. This was not only a moral necessity. I was convinced that we, as an institution, could not claim a future role for peacekeeping unless we demonstrated, in word and deed, a recognition of our moral and military failures. For a UN secretary-general, what he says—or fails to say—is often as important as what he does.
The first test of my commitment as secretary-general came with the 1999 Serbian campaign against the Kosovar Albanians. As Slobodan Miloševic’s onslaught grew in ferocity, I spoke in increasingly direct terms about the international community’s obligation to prevent another Bosnia—by force if necessary. And so when NATO decided to act against Serbia without Security Council authorization, I expressed regret but said that “there are times when the use of force is legitimate in the pursuit of peace.”
No secretary-general of the United Nations had ever before endorsed a military action that did not enjoy the blessing of the Security Council. I struggled greatly with this decision, but I believed that our experience in Rwanda, as well as Bosnia, had left us without easy answers. If, as I asked the General Assembly of the United Nations later that year in reference to Rwanda, “in those dark days and hours leading up to the genocide, a coalition of s
tates had been prepared to act in defense of the Tutsi population, but did not receive prompt Council authorization, should such a coalition have stood aside and allowed the horror to unfold?” I suspected that few leaders in the audience would wish to be purists in retrospect.
At the same time, I warned of the danger of a world without rules for intervention: “To those for whom the Kosovo action heralded a new era when states and groups of states can take military action outside the established mechanisms for enforcing international law, one might ask: Is there not a danger of such interventions undermining the imperfect, yet resilient, security system created after the Second World War, and of setting dangerous precedents for future interventions without a clear criterion to decide who might invoke these precedents, and in what circumstances?” Four years later, Iraq provided the tragic answer to this part of my question.
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Throughout my time as secretary-general, I sought to match the unique authority of the United Nations as the sole, truly universal organization of states with the credibility of seeing that rights were defended, suffering alleviated, and lives saved. In an increasingly fragmented twenty-first century populated by a growing number of private and public actors, abstract claims to legitimacy would simply not be enough. After all, what good was the UN’s unique legitimacy to the men and boys of Srebrenica, or to the Rwandans, in their hour of desperate need—all of whom were abandoned to their fate by a United Nations Security Council acting in perfect unity? If we were to win a primary role for the UN in the new era, we would have to acknowledge our past failures and set out a vision for how we would act differently in the future.