"One has to be careful," said United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in late August, "not to confuse the UN with the US." If the Secretary General had taken his own advice, maybe his Brazilian subordinate, Sergio Vieira de Mello, might not have been so summarily blown to pieces in Baghdad two days earlier.

Whichever group sent that truck bomb on its way decided that Vieira de Mello and his boss were so brazen in moving the UN to play a fig-leaf role in the US occupation of Iraq that spectacular action was necessary to draw attention to the process. So the UN man handpicked by the White House paid with his life.

To get a sense of how swift has been the conversion of the UN into after-sales service provider for the world's prime power, just go back to 1996, when the United States finally decided that Annan's predecessor as UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had to go.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.