UNVANQUISHED: A U.S.-U.N. Saga - Review

Washington Monthly, July, 1999 by Mike Shuster

UNVANQUISHED: A U.S.-U.N. Saga by Boutros Boutros-Ghali Random House, #29.95

I remember thinking during the 1996 presidential campaign how nasty it was that Republican candidate Bob Dole would get up in front of crowds all over the country and mock the name of the Secretary General of the United Nations: "Boootrus, Booo-trus Ghali." The middle-American inclination to make fun of foreign names might be tolerable in high schools or on the lips of late night TV comedians, but from the mouth of a U.S. presidential candidate, it seemed especially unbecoming. It turns out the man who was the object of Bob Dole's derision had the same reaction, in spades. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the sixth Secretary General of the United Nations and the only one to serve a single term, mentions it on page four of his just-published memoir, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga: "His mocking pronunciation of my name ... sounded like a jeering crowd, and his claim that American troops served under my `command' invariably aroused his audiences."

Boutros-Ghali, the first Arab and the first African to hold the position of Secretary General, did not start his term as an angry man. He came to the United Nations with new and bold ideas about what role it should play in the post-Cold War world. John Major called him a lucky man, and when Boutros-Ghali published An Agenda for Peace in 1992, he was hailed for breathing new life into what many saw as a moribund organization. "I could not have asked for a more positive start in my job," he writes. Boutros-Ghali's ideas for coping with the proliferation of regional and civil conflicts erupting nearly everywhere boiled down to this: preventive deployment of peacekeepers at the "earliest warning of serious trouble" and peace-enforcement" combat-ready units provided by member states" to "fill the gap between traditional U.N. peacekeeping units ... and large-scale operations?" These would be expensive ideas and far more controversial than they originally sounded. They would also eventually spark a suspicion and dislike in the United States that no Secretary General of the United Nations had ever experienced, and they would bring Boutros-Ghali down. Boutros-Ghali sent the first contingent of peacekeepers to the former Yugoslavia, and with the support of President Bush, the first peacekeepers into the failed state of Somalia. There were also substantial U.N. initiatives mounted in Cambodia and Haiti in 1992. His face appeared on the cover of Time on January 18, 1993, two days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president. With Clinton came the woman who would become Boutros-Ghali's nemesis: Madeleine Albright, the new United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Boutros-Ghali's portrait of Albright is one of the most fascinating and candid aspects of his memoir. He cannot resist taking a swipe from the start, calling her "short and plump" She seemed to "strike attitudes rather than address substantive issues?" In contrast to the difficult diplomatic work of persuasion, he writes, she preferred "to lecture or speak in declarative sentences, or simply to read verbatim from her briefing books."

Boutros-Ghali relates in detail the evolution of the 1993 conflicts in both Bosnia and Somalia, and the exercise is a valuable one. His account demonstrates how apparently natural allies can work at cross-purposes and eventually end up adversaries. At the center of this is the issue of the use of military power to back up diplomacy, a central theme of the Clinton administration's foreign policy. It arose early in Clinton's first term in 1993 over the question of air strikes in Bosnia and the use of force in Somalia. Boutros-Ghali depicts the Clinton foreign policy team as hopelessly confused about the relationship between diplomacy and military force, even eager to use military force that would have endangered U.N. personnel in Bosnia and gone far beyond Security Council resolutions the United States had supported.

This confusion led rapidly to the breakdown of relations between Boutros-Ghali and the Clintonites. By the end of 1993, things had sunk so low that in a meeting among the Secretary General, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Albright, the three could not communicate at all on the urgent issues before them: Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. One of Boutros-Ghali's aides described this meeting as "worse than a disaster?" None of the three was well-informed about all the complexities in each case (Boutros-Ghali acknowledges his own shortcomings here). Each became embarrassed when gaps in knowledge were exposed. The meeting concluded this way:

"`All right,' Christopher said finally, `the U.S. will keep you advised more about our intentions, but the U.S. expects to be respected more by you.' `I respect you one hundred percent,' I said, `but I need to be told more about what you want, what you are doing, and where you want to go.'"

That didn't help. By 1994, Boutros-Ghali writes: "The United States conveyed nothing to me directly. All I knew was what I read in the newspapers?"