As the United Nations and Iraq look beyond the brink, hope appears on the horizon.

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 manoeuvre 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.

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 Hammarskjold 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.

Hammarskjold 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 Hammarskjold 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 manoeuvre 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.

The Secretary-General had also taken the elementary precaution of sounding out Baghdad to ensure that they were serious about negotiating and would not use his arrival just as an opportunity to play to the gallery of world opinion. Even so, the agreement he achieved was essentially exactly what had been demanded by even the most hard-line parties, in effect freedom of movement for the inspectors no matter how many diplomatic bells and whistles accompanied their travels.

Kofi Annan's secret was the elementary practice of diplomacy and mediation, of a kind that he has exercised so often during his years as an international civil servant. Indeed, he was helped by the misgivings that some members of the Security Council publicly entertained over his mission. Their earlier opposition to his mission allowed the leadership in Baghdad to treat him as an independent agent of good will, rather than as an ultimatum-bearing herald for the armada mustered along Iraq's southern coast.

His promise to raise the question of the effect of sanctions with the Council was enhanced by the Council's agreement to his suggestion to double the oil-for-food arrangement; worldwide public concern about the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi population was already such that even the most belligerent of the parties could not raise strengthening sanctions as an option.

The eventual agreement allowed both sides to emerge with their dignities intact. Failure would have left both with much more than dignity to lose. Iraq would have had considerable physical damage and human casualties, and guaranteed continuing economic and diplomatic isolation. The allies, who were preparing for the military option, had already lost considerable international support for their intended action. And civilian casualties would have added to the growing concern the world public opinion had for the price being paid by the Iraqi population for their Government's actions.

In the end, the Secretary-General was able to get everybody off the hook. Which is, perhaps, a succinct job description for his Charter powers and responsibilities. Within a month of the agreement, the first "dignified" inspection of a "presidential site" had gone off smoothly. The tide of hostility against Richard Butler and UNSCOM had ebbed. And the prestige of the UN had been enhanced, except among some politicians who were unlikely to be great fans of multilateralism anyway.

As a result, we can anticipate future occasions where the UN Secretary-General involves himself - but not promiscuously so. Noticeably, he wisely resisted the temptation to volunteer intrusion into the log-jammed Middle East peace process in his tour of the countries involved in March. His character indicates that any such mission will be carefully assessed and prepared in advance. And he knows the sad truth that the world usually remembers the United Nations for its failures, not its successes.

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.