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

• Author: Shuster, Mike
• Position: Review

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...