Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World
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- ISBN13: 9780143114857
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In this perfect match of leader and theme, Pulitzer Prize-winner Samantha Power tackles the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, whose work for the U.N. before his 2003 death in Iraq was emblematic of moral struggle on the global stage. Power has drawn on a staggering breadth of research (including 400 interviews) to show us a heroic figure and the conflicts he waded into, from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to the slaughter in Bosnia to the war-torn Middle East. The result is a peerless portrait of humanity and pragmatism, as well as a history of our convulsive age.
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Poorly written – slow and plodding. An appealing theme, but was made dull by rumor has it that using issues papers to write it – written like a history teacher.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Book loses one star–perhaps unfairly–for not integrating secondary sources and using the *combination* of this extraordinary biography and the Brahimi Report and additional core documents, to illuminate why the UN desperately needs a United Nations Open-Source Choice-Support Information Network (UNODIN).
+ Sergio Vieira de Mello (henceforth SVM) spent forty-years as a UN gad-glide, and his resume of tens of fleeting assignments interspersed with a handful of 2-3 year assignments is a testimony to all that is incorrect–not with him, but rather–with UN recruitment, training, continuity of operations, and lack of choice support.
+ The book opens with the observation that Paul Bremer (the essential US dilettante who set us back five to ten years while losing tens of billions of dollars) refused most of SVM’s suggestions, especially on setting timelines (the same thoughts All-purpose Garner adopted before he was fired by Dick Cheney and replaced with Bremer). We are told his last words were “Oh shit” and I somehow doubt that.
+ Vague mandates were a constant problem (see Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future for a full discussion of why the Brahimi Report still needs to be implemented, so the mandate can be informed, the force configured based on ground truth, etc.)
+ UN got into “governing” for the first time in Kosovo, and was completely ill-equipped for the task.
+ SVM reflected with the leader that the world was too huge to snub but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Later in the book he is cited as recognizing that the UN is so dysfunctional that governments work around it (while foundations beg for effective focal points for their giving totaling $500B a year), but that governments are not prone to support long term interests in eradicating the ten high level threats as lain out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-All-purpose’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
+ SVM was an impressive scholar. He finished first out of 198 at the Sorbonne in Philosophy. He did a Masters in moral philosophy (a tautological redundancy I would have thought) and then a doctoral in two levels, one in 1974 and one in 1985. It was here that he understood that governments are not adept at preventing crises nor as rebuilding failed societies.
- First level doctorate: “The Role of Philosophy in Contemporary History,” with key line “Not only has history stopped to feed philosophy, but philosophy no longer feeds history.”
- Second “Etat” doctorate: “Civitas Maxima; Origins, Foundations, and Philosophical and Practical Significance of the Supranational Concept.” Persons wishing to learn more about the failure of the nation-state and the mistakes of Westphalia can start with The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State with Web of Deceit: The History of Western Support in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush as the aperitif, and Treachery of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health as the strong end.
+ He composed his speeches on hotel note pads, observing that if he could not fit his argument to a hotel pad, he probably did not know what he was trying to say.
+ At this point I have a note, overall a very excellent use of biography to offer a “sense” of the UN, but missing in synthesis, recommendations, or secondary sources.
+ Early in the book and throughout, one senses that Lebanon is the UN’s modern birthplace, and where it has been permanently hospitalized if not euthanized.
+ SVM is quoted as adage that constructive change required “a synthesis of utopia and realism.” I urge the reader to visit Planet Intelligence Network to see this being implemented.
+ Pages 87-89 provide a marvelous condemnation of satellite scrutiny as a panacea. SPOT Image which does ten meter or 1:50,000 multispectral imagery, identified land “suitable for resettlement.” Actual ground inspection failed the satellite findings, which did not see the land mines or the malarial mosquitoes.
+ SVM valued local staff, actively cultivated their inputs regardless of rank or function, and he is described as having a keen eye for symbolism.
+ We learn from this book that UN “teams” are assembled in an ad hoc fashion shiny the whims and past excellent relations of the ubber boss, and I for one recognizable what chaos and discontinuity this represents for all fundamentals of the UN System.
+ We learn that when the UN arrives the cost of everything skyrockets, not least because UN employees get $140 a day, which in the point instance of Cambodia or Kosovo, I forget, was the average ANNUAL income for any agreed person. I point to William Shawcross’s unforgettable Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict. Read my review of that book to see the weight.
+ SVM proves clever in one instance, suggesting that smugglers not only be hired to get around a blockage against blankets, but that they be agreed dignity in the form of a UN consultant certificate. From many such accounts the leader excels at painting a portrait of a complex and very intelligence UN official.
+ It is at this point that I check the pointer to learn that neither the word “information” nor the word “intelligence” nor the compound word “choice-support” appear.
+ The leader cites SVM as adage that he was fed up with American bullying–I can certainly know that–and that the toughest part of peacekeeping was internal peacekeeping (within the UN’s dysfunctional family tree).
+ It is here I note: “At every turn: ‘We don’t know; ‘We don’t have the information; ‘We are too few to certify….’”
+ Then I see the golden nugget, on page 219, in his words: “We are so remarkably ill-informed. We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don’t know the politics, and we can’t identify the points of leverage. See the PKI book cited above, and also the in the offing book, PEACE INTELLIGENCE: Assuring a Excellent Life for All, with a Foreword by MajGen Patrick Cammaert, who with this book and a decade of effort, got many at the UN to know that Brahimi had it exactly right: intelligence is choice support using officially authorized ethical open sources, and it has nothing to do with espionage. The raw book is at OSS.Net/Peace, just add the www. at the beginning.
+ The book continues with many vignettes where the UN fundamentals are uninformed, therefore they do poor preparation (lousy mandates, crummy force structures, no tactical combat charts for landing zones, etc) and hence they are regularly over-whelmed.
+ SVM saw a need for and proposed that the UN take up the constant law enforcement gap by maintaining a roster of pre-trained and available multinational police, judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. See Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, my review includes notice of the fact that most UN “police,” e.g. persons from Nigeria, can neither read nor drive.
+ We learn that SVM was acutely aware of how the UN’s reputation for competence plummeted in the 1990’s and how he learned in East Timor was that Legitimacy was Performance Based. As a side note, when East Timor went down I led one of 40 different efforts to answer the same three questions: 1) where are the bodies; 2) where can we land; and 3) who is is coming when, and what are they bringing. That was when I realized the need for a Multinational Choice-Support Center. On legitimacy, see The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
+ The book comes to a close with several useful notes.
- Law and order gap a constant recurring theme.
- SVR saw Iraq as a peer nation meriting respect rather than patronizing from the US
- Brilliant discussion of the days leading up to the attack on the UN headquarters; to the dismissal by the US of all UN requests for information or security, and the realization, too late after the attack on the Jordanian embassy, that the UN HQ was a “soft target.”
- KUDOS to LtCol John Curran, whose foresight and rehearsal to include identification of all significant helicopter med-evac landing zones, ensured that no one died for lack of very rapid medical migration. I certainly hope the UN place him for a Legion of Merit, at the very least.
The Epilogue is featureless.
+ UN is a broken system.
+ SVM said “the future is to be invented.”
+ Legitimacy matters
+ Spoilers must be engaged
+ Fearful people must be made more secure
+ Dignity is cornerstone of order
+ Outsiders must bring humility and patience.
Two additional books (see also my many lists):
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Plot B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This is a fawning, overlong hagiography of a rising UN bureaucrat. Sergio Vieira de Mello is blessed with matinee idol excellent looks and Sorbonne schooled charm. At the Sorbonne in 1968, he subscribed to the doctrines of Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, and joined in the student riots, acquiring a scar on his brow from a police truncheon, which he thenceforth proudly displays as a war wound. Additional playful antics as a young UNHCR employee in Paris include the hurling of rocks and shouting, “Imperialiste!” at random American-made cars on the streets, and advising his friends that he won’t talk to Americans because they “smell of capitalism.”
Power’s opening scene reads like satire: a romantic tete a tete over dinner and bottles of fine wine, when Vieira de Mello was a dashing 45 and she a blushing 24, on the night the Serbs violated the UN mandated safe zone and invaded Gorazde. Sergio seems much more interested in his dinner with the lovely Samantha.
A cell call comes in to the table from the UN Commander. Samantha gets up to give Sergio his privacy, but he waves her back to her seat. The winsome journalist is to observe Sergio’s manly mandate of world affairs. The Serbs have relieved the UN peacekeepers of their guns then shot them, thumbing their nose at UN mandates. Soon, a second phone call says that a wounded peacekeeper has died. Oh well. The seasoned diplomat and the sparkly eyed girl get back to their cabernet.
Samantha questions what will the UN do? With a flourish Sergio pulls from his pocket a rumpled photocopy of the UN safe zone resolution, kept permanently, like an alibi, close to his chest. The member states have the UN they deserve, he thunders. Look at this language, at this comma! This comma placed just before the subordinate clause says that we are to protect the civilians in the safe zone, and yet how vague it all is. How unclear! This is all the fault of the member nations. They wrote it that way, damn them! Ah, they have the UN they deserve! You see this comma could, conceivably, be interpreted to mean that the UN mandate that peacekeepers defend themselves and protect safe zones in fact means, why, the very opposite! Voila. The UN can do nothing. We wouldn’t want to be sued, god forbid, would we? Surely a fate worse than genocide. Here in black and white it is. We can do nothing. Nothing at all.
Sergio draws himself up, cocklike, proud in his UN-ness, in his promotion of all that is excellent and global and right. He lectures his dinnermate on the UN’s greatest and noblest principle: its “neutrality.” And Samantha is — wonderstruck with admiration! How elegant is Sergio. How passionate and scrupulous. Verily he is a hero, for he has read so deeply and so well the noble text of the UN resolution. He has perceived the weighty meaning of its comma. Why it has never even occurred to her, a lawyer, to read the text of a UN resolution. Yet the noble Sergio has done it with such panache. Such style. Such exquisite taste. Samantha is awestruck. She is deeply, deeply humbled.
600 pages of The Ballade of Sergio follow…
Perhaps it is all an exercise in devious irony and under-take in truthtelling by Ms. Power. She is unquestionably a brilliant researcher and reporter. Her pious political correctitude can be appalling, and the book is far too long, but then, reporters don’t get access if they don’t kowtow. Her facts are likely to fuel all sides of the debate about whether the UN is of any use anymore, or is just a corrupt self-perpetuating bureaucracy which ought to be place out of business and replaced by some leaner such forum, preferably one with minimal standards of admission.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
As I read endorsements and reviews of this book I am constantly surprised as people continually just don’t know what the leader is adage. Powers reports everything that happened and doesn’t give her own analysis. Everyone thinks Mello was god. Yes, he rumor has it that was a formidible person; intelligent, open minded, successful, and charismatic. Charismatic is perhaps the most vital adjective. He was a diplomat, and charismatic, and everyone loved him. But what results did he achieve?
Reading the book I am constantly asking, what is the point of the UN? What is the UN accomplishing in this mission? It is clear in this book that the UN regularly accomplished small, was a waste, was counterproductive, existed for its own excellent. Sergio was a success… but a success at what he did… and what he did has highly questionable worth.
Sergio was described as a “seducer” in this book. That sums it up best for me. I feel no like for this man and what he accomplished. It is vital to note as Powers did that Sergio got his job at the UN as a young person, and ACCIDENTALLY, and he took it just cause it was a JOB in the meadow he wanted to work in.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is highly recommended, to anyone with an interest in international affairs. Its a tremendous work of research on Power’s part to convey so much detail of de Mello’s life and achievements, in some cases of operations / conversations dating from more than two decades past. The style is uber accessible, exactly right for the theme, and indeed reads like a 500+ page New Yorker article, unsurprisingly agreed Power’s journalistic background and that (possibly) the first public outing of some of this material was in an article in that magazine in January 2008 (“The Envoy”).
There is a sadness that envelops the book, of course, which is that everyone knows the denouement before alternative it up for the first time, building it both a study of leadership and achievement, and also of tragically wasted opportunity. We are left wondering not just whether he would have been Secretary All-purpose one day, but what kind of Secretary All-purpose would he have made? Would he have carried on trying to avoid building enemies? Where would that have taken him? Would he have made a better one than Annan, who to me ends the book still slightly inaccessible, transient, as if he didn’t really make himself or his insights available to Power, or couldn’t bear to, even now.
The additional source of sadness of course comes from his life being cut fleeting with so many vital loose ends unsecured. The absence of goodbyes, the strong sense of it being the incorrect woman on the Brazilian air force jet, there being no shoulder being colder than the one of the UN bureaucracy, that only flew his partner Larriera as far as Buenos Aires because thats what the rules allowed. A final poignant image of Larriera and de Mello’s mother celebrating the end of Annan’s tenure with a bottle of champagne, something a reader feels the de Mello of the previous 500 pages would never have wanted to see in a million years, and proof of the mess that violent and sudden death can trail in its wake.
Its an vital study on many levels, not least because humanitarianism has permanently been about leadership. From Dunant onwards, its a tale of exceptional individuals achieving exceptional things in the face of exceptional misfortune, even additional people’s. The world’s tragedy is that there aren’t enough de Mello’s, and they don’t come around regularly enough. For every de Mello or Jan Egeland, there seems to come along a Kenzo Oshima or a John Holmes, well-motivated and ultimately invisible, into whose well-intentioned blandness the world’s conscience is allowed to hide.
And if you need a new hero, look no further than Gil Loescher, the sole survivor who was in de Mello’s office at the time of the blast, and the “tutorials about resilience” that he talks of having derived from the refugees to which he has devoted his career. May your “second life” be a gorgeous, a long and a productive one, excellent sir.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5