Who Influences Kofi Annan?
Quick: How would Kofi Annan act if Secretary of State Rice and President Chirac advised him to do one thing, and President Assad of Syria urged the opposite? Mr. Annan phoned the Damascus dictator last Monday to warn him against interfering in or delaying next month’s Lebanese election. Mr. Assad, in turn, requested that the secretary-general delay a report he was scheduled to deliver to the Security Council last week. The report, mandated by the council, is expected to evaluate the pace of Syria’s implementation of a resolution demanding that all of its forces leave Lebanon. That resolution, known as 1559, is an important component of the Cedar Revolution – one of America’s most promising policy successes in transforming the Middle East. The report was going to say that Syria implemented the resolution only partially. The Syrians were not ready to declare that their troops had left Lebanon, and so the increasingly weakened Damascus strongman needed to procrastinate. Some of Mr. Annan’
