Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict.

Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict by William Shawcross Simon & Schuster. 447 pages. $27.50.

These books address issues that affect millions of people around the world. They are not light or uplifting reads. They deal with some of the low points of the past decade, episodes that include the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed perhaps one million people and the sanctions against Iraq that have killed hundreds of thousands. But they are valuable contributions to the public debate. They make us wrestle with large-scale evil and demand that the international community find ways to prevent it.

The books are complementary in many ways. While The Sanctions Decade is filled with analysis and proposals, Deliver Us from Evil is mainly narrative. Both rely on many of the same sources, and they often deal with different aspects of U.N. policy--sanctions and peacekeeping--applied toward the same country. Occasionally, they tread over the same ground and come out with somewhat different conclusions.

William Shawcross seems to have lost some of his edge since he wrote his classic Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (Simon & Schuster, 1979), which argued that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and its interference in the country's internal politics paved the way for the Khmer Rouge's murderous reign. The main problem with his new book is that Deliver Us from Evil, unlike Sideshow, lacks a central thesis, or at least a compelling one. The insights that Shawcross has to offer this time come down to two points: Some problems in the world are so intractable that they require more than quick fixes, and the United Nations, due to the political exigencies of the Security Council, is unable to offer these long-term solutions. But these aren't original insights. Anyone who has given international affairs more than a casual glance over the past decade will be aware of them.

Much of Shawcross's book reads like a slightly more detailed account of conflicts in the hot spots of the 1990s--Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone--than what you would read in The New York Times. Shawcross also deals at length with the structure and mission of the United Nations and recent battles within it, including the drama surrounding Boutros Boutros-Ghali's departure. Which is not to say that Shawcross is just an armchair analyst. He traveled around the world in preparation for this book, and some of his eyewitness descriptions are arresting.

He goes to hospitals and medical camps in Sierra Leone, where people whose arms were chopped off by the rebels mill around traumatized. He visits genocide memorials in Rwanda, where skulls and bones are laid side by side. He quotes Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire on the situation of the U.N. troops under his command there, who were "standing knee deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies. I found myself walking through villages where the only sign of life was a goat, or a chicken, or songbird, as all the people were dead, their bodies being eaten by voracious packs of wild dogs."

Shawcross's first-hand accounts highlight the thankless and extremely dangerous jobs that U.N. personnel have had to undertake during their missions around the world. This September alone, four U.N. workers were killed. Since 1992, almost 200 U.N. workers have been killed around the world. Roughly 130 peacekeepers died in Somalia.

On many of his travels, Shawcross accompanied U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Unfortunately, the second part of the book almost becomes an account of Annan's doings and an interpretation of the world through his eyes. Shawcross is heavily enamored of Annan to the point of fawning over him:

"The more I traveled with Annan and talked to him in the early nineties, the more remarkable he seemed--an international civil servant who had not become a bureaucrat. He dealt with people in a familiar yet persuasive way and managed to retain both dignity and authority. He is not a tall man, but has an unusual presence that seems to come from an innate sense of calm and politeness. He speaks softly and rarely appears angry or even flustered. He also has a very lively, indeed sometimes even mischievous, sense of fun. He is quite different from anyone else I have met at the United Nations or in most other places."

Shawcross tends to explain away Annan's mistakes even where he points them out, such as when Annan (as the U.N. peacekeeper in charge) ignored a fax that warned of the impending genocide in Rwanda.

As a result, the book lacks a voice of its own.

David Cortright and George A. Lopez note that economic sanctions have become an increasingly frequent tool of international policy. They have been applied twelve times over the past decade, as compared to only twice in the previous forty-five years.

Cortright and Lopez are progressives. Cortright was a leader with Peace Action in the 1980s and now is the president of the Fourth Freedom Forum in Goshen, Indiana. Lopez is a professor of government and international studies at the University of Notre Dame. In their own nuanced manner, however, the authors cautiously come out for U.N. economic sanctions, although they argue for a different approach than has been applied in the past.

The authors contend that the sanctions against Iraq did fulfill their initial goals, since they forced Iraq to allow weapons inspections and recognize its boundary with Kuwait. Strangely enough, they almost completely skip mentioning how Saddam Hussein's fear of renewed large-scale bombing may have persuaded him to comply with U.N. resolutions. But they rightly note that Washington insisted sanctions would not be lifted until Saddam Hussein is out of power, an attitude that Saddam soon caught on to. The result has been a prolonged stalemate.

In the case of Slobodan Milosevic, Cortright and Lopez state that economic sanctions were a major instrument in persuading him to come to the negotiating table to sign the Dayton peace accords. In this case, they do acknowledge that the NATO bombing campaign and Bosnian Serb military reversals played a large part in getting Milosevic to sue for peace but argue that the sanctions were a major factor, too.

Cortright and Lopez point out the devastating impact that sanctions have had in some instances, most notably in Iraq. In other places, such as Angola, Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda, the authors say that the sanctions have been too ineffectively applied to have any major impact and were put into effect merely to forestall more rigorous action to stop the killings in these countries. They acknowledge that sanctions often have the effect of harming opposition groups and civil society and have the unintended effect of rallying support for the reigning regime by deflecting the blame onto external enemies.

Cortright and Lopez come out with a list of recommendations for making sanctions more effective, such as applying "smart" targeted sanctions--freezing the financial assets of leaders and imposing travel and aviation bans--and calibrating them to reflect change in a regime's behavior. They also propose a regular assessment of the humanitarian impact of U.N. sanctions.

They state in their concluding chapter: "If economic sanctions are to serve as an alternative to military force, or even as a viable complement to more forceful forms of coercion, many improvements will be necessary. As the case studies in this volume illustrate, sanctions too often suffer from poor design, loose commitment from member states, inadequate monitoring, and lax enforcement. The present limitations of sanctions stem in part from the shortcomings of the U.N. system. They also result from the lack of sanctions enforcement capability in many member states."

Both books point out how the United States dominates and distorts the U.N. Security Council. And yet both books fail to address the central question of how to reform the United Nations, given U.S. power. If U.S. policy was, indeed, the main reason for the international failure to stop the Rwandan genocide and if it is primarily responsible for the heavy-handedness of the sanctions against Iraq, then shouldn't Cortright, Lopez, and Shawcross advocate a democratization of the decision-making process at the United Nations?

The composition of the Security Council represents the balance of power at the end of World War II when much of the world was still under the burden of colonialism. The developing world, with the exception of China, is still relegated to the role of passing ineffective resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly. Granted, any reform of the Security Council and removal or dilution of the veto power of its members remains a pipe dream under current circumstances. Still, such proposals have been advanced by a number of scholars, and it seems curious the authors sidestep the issue, since it jumps out of both books.

Is it right that the five permanent members of the Security Council--the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China--have such a disproportionate impact on the future of this planet? The authors of both these books don't seem to think so and yet they won't quite come out and say it.

The United States is in no position to promote genuine internationalism. From its reluctance to pay its regular and peacekeeping dues to the United Nations to its opposition to a standing U.N. peacekeeping force and a permanent International Criminal Court, the United States has often been a hindrance. The United States is opposed to an international land mines treaty, unless "suitable alternatives" can be found. And it refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice when the court found it guilty of sponsoring the contra war in Nicaragua.

Many progressives seem to think that any international action taken by a U.S.-led United Nations has to be deeply flawed, since U.S. foreign policy is guided primarily by self-serving economic and strategic interests. This may be so, but to stand idly by while genocide occurred in Rwanda or mass slaughter in Srebrenica is not a moral position. Surely, many in the progressive community must have been not too unhappy with U.N. intervention in East Timor, whose liberation was long championed by progressives. A knee-jerk opposition to U.S. interventionism abroad does not solve such conundrums.

The matter of sanctions is a tricky one, too. Sanctions against apartheid South Africa had a lot of progressive support. In fact, some progressives initially favored sanctions against Iraq in 1990 as an alternative to war. Of course, there's been a rethinking of such a position since then, but on what principles?

We cannot say we are in favor of sanctions in lieu of war, and then say we are opposed to sanctions after all.

Both books raise large questions, and some of these were discussed at the just-concluded Millennial Assembly at the United Nations.

Should the international community censure and try to overthrow--through sanctions and military interventions--rulers and regimes that violate basic norms of decency at home and abroad?

If so, who should be targeted and in what way?

And who has the right to make these decisions?

Finally, is the present global system so compromised to serve U.S. interests that it is futile to even conceptualize such a framework?

Sanctions and peacekeeping continue to be life-and-death issues for millions. The issues that surround them will not go away. These books, in spite of their omissions and flaws, contribute a great deal to the debate over how successful sanctions and peacekeeping are as strategies for making the world a better place.

Amitabh Pal is Editor of The Progressive Media Project.