The Fight of His Life

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Whatever happens, the scandal will, in the eyes of some, cast an indelible shadow over Annan's once glittering resume. He got the top U.N. job in 1996 when Clinton Administration officials turned on Boutros Boutros-Ghali for trying to use the U.N. as a balance against U.S. world hegemony after the cold war, a falling-out that cost him a second term. Annan, born in Ghana in 1938, made his career as the quintessential insider. His tenure as head of U.N. peacekeeping in the 1990s was marred by the U.N.'s failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. But Washington saw him as a dedicated consensus builder who could prove more amenable to American interests than the prickly Boutros-Ghali. Now "nations that had earlier considered him America's man," says former French Ambassador to the U.S. François Bujon de l'Estang, "support him almost without reserve."

Annan has had "a brilliant first term, during which everything went right," says a former U.N. official. "His basic message of human rights fit right in with the Zeitgeist." If by 2003 the relationship between Annan and the U.S. was souring, it went rotten because of Iraq. During the prolonged crisis in the Security Council over Bush's quest for approval to invade Iraq last year, Annan stayed behind the scenes, working the phones in an intense search for unity. Yet conservatives blame him, along with the French and the Russians, for failing to line up U.N. support for the U.S.-led war. He and his aides, says John Ruggie, who worked with Annan until mid-2001, "don't like the U.S. throwing its weight around, especially when they think the Americans are wrong."

When Bush invaded anyway, Annan felt keenly the U.N.'s diminished authority to keep world peace and its paralysis in the face of American domination. At the same time, he has often spoken about the need for international involvement in Iraq. But deliberately or not, he has managed to grate on Administration officials, first by telling an interviewer in September that the war was "illegal"--"My guess is he wishes he hadn't said that," says a diplomatic official — and later by sending a letter to Bush criticizing U.S. plans to seize the restive Iraqi city of Fallujah. Annan has also come under attack for his reluctance to send enough U.N. experts back into Baghdad after 22 people, including his close friend Sergio Vieira de Mello, were killed by a car bomb at their headquarters 15 months ago. A U.N. diplomat says Georgia and Romania have offered their troops to serve as military escorts so that the U.N. can increase the number of staff members helping prepare for the January elections.

The irony of the campaign against Kofi Annan is that he may be the Secretary-General most inclined to recognize U.N. flaws and try to fix them. Last week a panel appointed by Annan a year ago proposed a sweeping overhaul of the way the lumbering world body does business, calling for expanding the Security Council and addressing when the use of force is justified. And Chris Shays, the Republican chairman of a House committee investigating oil-for-food, points out that trying to force Annan's resignation now, at a time when the U.S. very much needs the U.N. in Iraq, would be a mistake. "We have very serious work to do in the years ahead, and I want to focus on that," Annan said last week, before acknowledging, "Obviously, in this climate it is not going to be easy."