Annan himself clearly had no illusions.

He told the press in Baghdad, "You can do a lot with diplomacy, but of course you can do a lot more with diplomacy backed up by firmness and force." And back in New York, he implicitly endorsed the tough line taken by the United States and the United Kingdom by describing their leaders as "perfect UN peace-keepers", who worked on the principle that "the best way to use force is to show it, in order not to use it".

In effect the Secretary-General was creatively adapting Theodore Roosevelt's old maxim, and speaking softly while someone else carried the big stick.

More importantly for the United Nations, Annan has underscored a precedent that was on the verge of being forgotten after 40 years of constant erosion. In 1956, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld secured general approval for what became known as the "Peking formula", by flying to Beijing to negotiate over American-Korean war prisoners, with Chou En Lai, Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China. The PRC had not yet been allowed to take up its seat in the United Nations which added extra legal complications.

Hammarskjöld invoked the Secretary- General's prerogatives under article 98 of the UN Charter to justify his visit. As summarized by Brian Urquhart in his definitive biography, "the Secretary-General did not work for any one nation, or even for a majority of nations as expressed in a vote of the General Assembly, but under his constitutional responsibility for the general principles set out in the United Nations Charter". At that time, the veto-bound Security Council was not an issue, but in contemporary circumstances the general precedent was clearly transferable to it.

The Security Council resolution (1154 (1998) of 2 March) that endorsed the agreement between Iraq and the Secretary-General illustrates some of the ambiguities involved in reviving a semi-moribund precedent. Several speakers in the debate explicitly recorded their view that the endorsement was, in strict legal terms, unnecessary. In "commending" the initiative, however, the members were implicitly reviving and reinforcing the Peking precedent. Of course, for others, the reason for the resolution was to bring under Chapter VII (Article 42) of the Charter any subsequent Iraqi breach of its commitments.

However, while Annan may want to steer the UN ship into new waters, no one can accuse him of venturing into uncharted seas. In political terms, a lot has changed since Hammarskjöld first explored the precedent. With a military conflagration threatening, it was no time to get into a procedural wrangle about whether the Secretary-General was entitled to take such an initiative.

Nor would it have been fruitful to secure an agreement that powerful members of the Council could or would later disavow. So, while firmly maintaining that his position gave him the mandate he needed to undertake the mission, he sedulously sought the approval of the Security Council for it, collectively and individually.

While Kofi Annan regarded this as consensus-building consultation, at least one member seems to have seen this initially as a process of tying the Secretary-General down with instructions that would reduce his freedom of manœuvre to the point of making him more of a speaking telegram than a diplomat. And, in the end, although he did not go with "instructions", his implied terms of reference were defined by "words of advice" read to him by British Ambassador Sir John Weston. It was less restrictive and certainly more courteous than the alternative and, as it happened, still gave him the flexibility he needed.

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