NEW YORK — It's crunch time for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will come under pressure from the United States and its Iraqi allies today at a meeting to help rescue plans for forming a new Iraqi government by July.
If Annan agrees to send United Nations political and electoral experts back to Iraq in force, they will need extensive security protection from the United States -- and the authority to arrange the political transition without being overruled by U.S. occupation authorities, U.N. officials and analysts said. Otherwise, the U.N. risks sharing blame with the U.S. for a failure in the democratic experiment in Iraq.
If Annan declines to play a significant role, either for security reasons or because he feels the U.N. would not have sufficient authority to carry out its mission, he risks the U.N. being branded, as President Bush put it, "irrelevant."
"I don't think Kofi Annan has the luxury of walking away from this
"Nobody wants to see this process fail. Nobody can afford to see Iraq implode," said one U.N. official. "But we want to keep the interests of the Iraqi people at the center of what we do, and we have to be careful in which way we go from here."
The U.N.'s first attempt to play a role in postwar Iraq ended in tragedy. After major combat was over, the world body sent in a large team of political advisors headed by Annan's special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello -- but many at the U.N. thought the mission was ill-defined. Vieira de Mello and most of his key staff were killed Aug. 19, when a truck bomb struck U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
It was a huge blow to Annan and the entire U.N. Secretariat, losing close personal friends -- and some of the world body's most respected troubleshooters.
After the bombing, the U.N. withdrew its international staff. Although Annan recently agreed to send in a four-person team under U.S. protection to reassess the security situation, he has hesitated to send staff back to Baghdad without the means to protect them and a mission compelling enough to justify the risk.
"Kofi is angered at himself for letting Sergio go to Baghdad when the conditions weren't right," said Nancy Soderberg, a former U.S. envoy to the U.N. "He's just not going to go back unless he feels the political situation is right."
Nevertheless, now that the Bush administration wants the United Nations to play a more prominent political role, U.S. officials say Annan is weighing the consequences of not participating against the security risks.
