Deliver Us from Evil Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict [Paperback]

The Cold War has been followed by a decade of regional and ethnic conflicts, massacres, and forced exiles. Should America assume the role of peacekeeper and chief humanitarian in a world of endless wars and human disasters? Eminent foreign correspondent William Shawcross has spent much of his career in war zones and has had unrivaled access to diplomats, peacekeepers, and global policymakers at the highest levels, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, for whom he has high regard. InDeliver Us from Evil,which has a new epilogue for the paperback edition, Shawcross takes us behind the lines with him to Cambodia, Bosnia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Rwanda, and Kosovo to show us how complex and costly Western interventions are and how naïve are our hopes of peacemaking without bloodshed.William Shawcrossis the author ofSideshow,for which he won the George Polk Award for reporting and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize, as well asThe Quality of Mercy, The Shah's Last Ride,andMurdoch.He lives in England.Deliver Us from Evilwas one of six finalists for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's most prestigious nonfiction award.Chapter One: Another World War

On a dark afternoon in January 1999, with the wind chill factor down to minus ten and snow rushing around outside the thirty-eighth floor of the United Nations headquarters in New York, the secretary general, Kofi Annan, could be forgiven for feeling beleaguered. Nineteen ninety-eight, he said to me, was a hell of a year. But I think 1999 will be worse.

Eleven months before, he had been hailed in much of the world as a savior after persuading Saddam Hussein to permit UN inspectors to resume their search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, thus stopping the United States and Great Britain from bombing Iraq. One newspaper called him the world's secular pope, a phrase which recalls Joseph Stalin's mocking question, How many divisions has thels!