This book successfully argues the case for monarchy. Politicians, scandals, and events come and go, but there, above it all, remains the Queen.

I found it in of all places, a outdoor market in the capital of Cambodia this summer. Cambodia is great for finding bootleg copies of any books on Cambodia.

Shawcross has written a well documented, researched, and written book on Cambodia's role in the Vietnam War. It was easy to read and it certainly made you think.

Unfortunately, I disagree with the tone of the book. And ultimately I disagree with the author's point of view. But anyone interested in the Vietnam War, Nixon, or what happened in Cambodia should read this book. I ultimately disagreed with the book, you may or may not, but regardless it is a book that is well written and will make you think.

Check this book out!

Both Loas and Cambodia were neutral in the conflict and the United States faced a problem in getting them to stop the movement of troops and supplies through their territory.

The United States used the CIA to fund a private army in Laos to fight against the Pathet Lao the indigenous communist movement. In Cambodia a coup was organised to remove the government of Shinouk and to replace it with Lon Nol. Once that was done Lon Nol gave permission for the United States to bomb Cambodian territory and later for the South Vietnamese Army to mount armed raids into Cambodia.

The air raids were immensely heavy and dropped bomb loads which were similar to the entire tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany in the Second World War. The combination of the bombing and the coup led to the collapse of Cambodia's social fabric. Large numbers of peasants moved off the land to escape the bombing and swelled the capital. The American actions strengthened the hand of the local communists the Kyhmer Rouge and they started to win the civil war. This in turn led to more refugees. Towards the end the Lon Nol government was reduced to total dependence on imported food supplies flown in by the United States. I the end the Kyhmer Rouge were victorious and turned out to be one of the most murderous regimes of the century. (Some claim that on a per capita basis they were the most vicious in the 20th Century a good century for murderous regimes)

This book is an expose of what is a serious blot on the foreign policy record of the United States. It was a significant book at the time as a range of the actions carried out against Cambodia were illegal. However unlike some of the other tragedies of the last century the tragedy of Cambodia seems to be fading into the background.

I read Shawcross's DELIVER US FROM EVIL cover to cover. Finally, someone was presenting an overview of the tumultuous nineties. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Zair, East Timor, Kossovo--they are all covered in an informed, evenhanded way. The author largely leads us through the eyes of Koffi Annan, who becomes Secretary General of the UN halfway through the book. The author's obviously extraordinary access to Annan makes this vantage point vibrant, compelling, and renders coherence to apparently unrelated conflicts. World diplomacy is an exercise in frustration and this book does a great job of keeping the attention of the reader who gets this point from the beginning and who knows its ending.

Two are the principal drawbacks of this recounting of the nightmares of the nineties. Shawcross does not spend much time on international criminal justice nor on international finance. The collapse of East Asian financial systems which threatened a world-wide crisis cannot be irrelevant to all these humanitarian crises. Perhaps the relation is superficial--that insolvent goventnments cannot afford to maintain or impose peace--but it might be quite deeper, perhaps triggeming or motivating unrest in various ways.

The nineties, the book shows, were a crucial time for international criminal justice. Regional courts for war crimes were established to punish war criminals and deter atrocities. Eventually, a permanent international court for war crimes was established. Neither the function, nor the creation, nor the arguments surrounding the jurisdiction of these institutions are covered in sufficient depth. These are the drawbacks that shade an otherwise admirable account of an extraordinarily confusing decade.

A Close Examination of UN Peacekeeping Forces By David Isenberg Stars and Stripes Contributing Writer

Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

After reading this book nobody will ever again be able to contemplate a call to deploy United Nations peacekeepers without gagging. After I read it I was reminded of the saying that one is either part of the problem or part of the solution. For years people have assumed that when it came to peace and conflict issues in general and peacekeeping in specific that the United Nations was part of the solution. Perhaps it's time to change our minds. The Bible may say "Blessed are the peacemakers" but UN peacekeepers, unfortunately, are not.

In this book William Shawcross, longtime British journalist and veteran of many war zones, has written a dispassionate account of most of the major conflicts the UN has been involved in. The first part is a detailed, and at times dizzying history of UN involvement in the killing zones whose names we have seen so many times in the news: Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Chechnya, and Iraq. He analyzes, in great detail, the few, partial, tentative successes that UN Blue Helmets, such as UNTAC in Cambodia, and the far too many failures such as Rwanda, Somalia, and Sierra Leone.

The second part is a review, as seen by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan with whom Shawcross has obviously spent a great deal of time with, of the politics and diplomacy that occurred in the amorphous creature called the "international community," especially those nations that are members of the UN Security Council.

Sometimes it is hard to know which is worse; reading the accounts of the various atrocities perpetrated by the warlords and thugs posing as national leaders, i.e., Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevich, Foday Sankoh, Laurent Kabilah, or reading about the petty intrigues and bickering among the leaders of the Western governments and in the UN Secretariat.

Reading this book is like driving by a traffic accident; you are horrified by what you see but you can't keep from looking. The accounts of the enormous pressures encountered by Kofi Anan in trying to secure pledges of funds personnel, and approval for peacekeeping operations, and the obstacles encountered by UN peacekeepers from the forces who oppose their deployment, makes one appreciate that, unlike the Cold War era, there is no longer any peace to keep and precious little will to make peace.

At a time when UN forces are being captured by the hundreds by rebels in a heart of darkness like Sierra Leone one realizes that if UN peacekeeping operations could be symbolized by a car it would be the Edsel.

Though Shawcross is obviously sympathetic to the idea of UN peacekeeping he is too much the dispassionate observer to believe that current "humanitarian" interventions are a model to follow in the future. His last words are "In a more religious time it was only God whom we asked to deliver us from evil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance. That is sometimes to ask for miracles."

A review of Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

So, yes, this book is about peacekeeping, that amorphous blob of activity the international community tasks the UN with accomplishing every day in conflict zones throughout the world. It is clear that expectations far exceed what the UN is capable of delivering, as Mr. Shawcross points out early on. The UN in the nineties was tasked with bringing peace to areas where conflict had erupted, following the end of the Cold War. Mr. Shawcross does an admirable job of describing how well and how often that did not work, and how deep the failures were.

This book is not a UN bashing book, though. It certainly points out the problems at the UN, but Mr. Shawcross knows that these problems, just as the UN itself, are the creation of the member states and their political leaders. In particular, the most powerful member state, the United States, has played a spectacularly unhelpful role. Congress nearly destroyed the UN financially in the late nineties, largely driven by provincial isolationists in the Republican Party. President Clinton and his top advisors were no better, perhaps most notably during the Rwandan genocide. Muddled decisions from the administration did much to worsen crises and conflicts the world over.

Mr. Shawcross puts his finger squarely on the problem. Time after time it has been a lack of political will. The inability of the international community to summon the courage to stop the deaths of millions of blacks in Rwanda, Burundi, and other parts of Africa is one of the more despicable features of the twentieth century, and one of the examples of problems with UN peacekeeping that Mr. Shawcross covers quite well. The U.S. and other countries are simply not willing to back up words with actions.

Hard and fast solutions are not offered by Mr. Shawcross. The reader would be better directed to other works for that. (The book came out prior to the UN's own surprisingly honest and straightforward assessment of peacekeeping, the Brahimi Report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan.) But to understand the problems with UN peace operations, and to understand the fundamental root cause of these problems, the lack of political will to act, or to act well, this book is better than most. Mr. Shawcross suggests in the end that UN peace operations have too often been about asking for miracles.

But make no mistake; he does not suggest that peacekeeping should be abandoned. And certainly this book should not provoke a reader to gag at the idea of deploying peacekeepers-they should gag, however, at the antics of their elected officials. The U.S. and other countries sit at the Security Council and give the UN grand and noble tasks to save the world, but when it comes to providing the means to accomplish those tasks, failure is palpable. The abject failure of government officials to match actions to words is what we truly need deliverance from.

Shawcross presents a very balanced picture, light on both censure and praise, and manages to give enough personal detail to illuminate the public Murdoch without veering into a personal melodrama. The writing is occasionally a bit dry, but generally of a high quality & the source notes and bibliography are quite valuable in and of themselves.