Immediately after his appointment as Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan told the United Nations press corps that the office he was about to take up "also has a political and diplomatic role, and above all a moral voice, which should be heard periodically when necessary".

Just over a year later, in January 1998, the impasse over the United Nations Special Commission's (UNSCOM) inspections of Iraqi sites and the war fleets flocking to the Persian Gulf clearly demanded that someone should intervene.

But it was perhaps a measure of how the United Nations had come to be regarded in the chancelleries of the world, that any calls for action by the Secretary-General were relatively muted.

True, the cold war had given his predecessors some room for manœuvre between the contending blocs. But successive incumbents had taken fewer and fewer such opportunities.

And with the end of the cold war, there seemed a growing sense that the Secretary General was there to carry out instructions from the Member States, not least from some of the permanent Security Council members.

That is perhaps why the stand-off over the Iraqi inspections called for a moral strength, as well as all Kofi Annan's political and diplomatic skills. Far from being under pressure to intervene, his involvement risked annoying several very important UN members, and carried a high chance of failure.

There were no clear signals that any of the sides most directly involved wanted a mediated settlement. They showed every indication that they wanted to force different forms of humiliation and defeat on the other.

It was a crisis that, left to the parties, risked spiralling off into unforeseeable consequences for them, for the United Nations and for the rest of the world. And is what explains the global sigh of relief that greeted the successful outcome of the Secretary-General's trip to Baghdad from 20 to 23 February.

On the face of it, UN involvement was unavoidable. But it was far from obvious that the Secretary-General could play the role of honest broker. It was after all Kofi Annan himself who had nominated Richard Butler as the Chairman of UNSCOM. Over the following months, the disagreements were often presented as somehow personally provoked by Butler, who, in fact, had greeted his own appointment with qualified optimism. "I hope to be able to go to the Council at the earliest opportunity with a report consistent with the Council's own views, to say it's over, it's done. I'm not an idiot. That's not going to be in ten minutes, weeks nor months. What the Council will decide about such a report is its own political business, but I think it's worth doing. ... If the Council can be persuaded to raise sanctions on Iraq, then the Iraqi people would be better off."

It is now sometimes forgotten that Butler's renownedly forebearing predecessor, Rolf Ekeus, was himself using quite strong language about the lack of cooperation his inspection teams received. If even the infinitely patient Ekeus was having problems, what magic ingredient did Kofi Annan bring? According to Tariq Aziz, it was "the goodwill that he brought with him. ... In fact there was no crisis between Iraq and the UN ... the crisis was with the US", he said.

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About the Author:

Ian Williams is correspondent for The Nation and current Vice-President of the United Nations Correspondents' Association, of which he has been President on two earlier occasions.