In the spring of 2000, Kofi Annan entrusted Lakhdar Brahimi, his current special envoy in Iraq, with conducting a wide report into improving UN peacekeeping operations. Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, pulled no punches. In his report he outlined three main issues. First, the UN should not accept unclear mandates. Second, the UN was not functioning as a meritocracy: staff were hired, assigned and promoted on the basis of personal and political contacts rather than on ability. Third, as a result of the above, a small number of outstanding officers were given “unreasonable workloads” to cover the shortcomings of the others. Brahimi concluded that these issues, if not addressed, would make any “lasting reform of the UN impossible.”
The Brahimi report was lavishly praised and then forgotten. Three years later, the Baghdad bomb – which killed 23 staff, including UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello – and the inquiry into the bombing that followed confirmed most of the deficiencies Brahimi had identified.
After the fall of Saddam, most of the relevant political actors concluded that some sort of UN presence in Iraq was desirable. The UN was desperate to reaffirm its relevance. For the US, a UN presence, albeit not one with a dominant role, was seen as providing a veneer of legitimacy for the occupation. And several countries which had been instrumental in denying UN endorsement for the US invasion did not wish to aggravate further their already strained relations with the US and thus did not raise objections to a UN role post-invasion.
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