During his ten years as Secretary-General of the United Nations<\/a>, Kofi Annan was often spoken of as a figure of preternatural calm. He appeared, even to those who worked most closely with him, to be a man devoid of anger, who would never take things personally\u2014a quality reflected in his habit of speaking, when matters of consequence were at stake, in the royal \u201cwe.\u201d Annan\u2019s ability to project this unflappable persona\u2014the honest broker between conflicting interests\u2014was generally cited as his great strength. In other, much more profound ways, however, this aloofness was his defining weakness. Prior to becoming Secretary-General, in 1997, Annan served as the head of the U.N.\u2019s peacekeeping department, and in that capacity presided over the ignominious failures of the U.N. missions in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Yet, right up until his death, on Saturday, in Switzerland, he steadfastly refused to acknowledge any meaningful sense of personal or institutional responsibility for these debacles, even as he spoke tirelessly of the world\u2019s desperate need for more responsible leadership\u2014\u201ccool heads and sober judgment,\u201d as he put it in an interview<\/a> with the BBC, in April, in one of his final public appearances, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.<\/p>\n Annan\u2019s image of cool was, of course, just that: an image. There is no mistaking the prickly personal pique, for instance, in a cable he sent in 1995, on the eve of the first anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, to another U.N. official. The tone of defensive derision is established in the first sentence: \u201cEvery now and then some journalist or human rights advocate remarks, usually on the media, that either they themselves or someone else had warned unamir<\/em>\u201d\u2014the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda\u2014\u201cof the impending genocide.\u201d Annan then wrote, \u201cWe do not recall any specific reports from Kigali to this effect.\u201d A review of the peacekeeping files, he wrote, had turned up only four cables from Kigali in the months preceding the genocide that mentioned \u201cethnic tensions as being possibly related\u2014or not related\u2014to specific incidents of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n But, in reality, one of the four cables Annan listed consisted of an alarmingly specific report of preparations for the genocide, sent by his force commander in Kigali, the Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, in January of 1994. Dallaire had heard from a trusted informant on the payroll of Rwanda\u2019s ruling party, who described plans to \u201cprovoke a civil war,\u201d and to kill Belgian peacekeepers in order to scuttle the U.N. mission. The informant himself said he was involved in drawing up lists of Tutsis in Kigali, and Dallaire wrote, \u201cHe suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in twenty minutes his personnel could kill up to a thousand Tutsis.\u201d Dallaire asked for permission to act on this information by raiding and seizing illegal arms caches. Annan\u2019s office replied at once, in a cable under his name, and signed by his deputy, telling Dallaire not to act but, rather, to follow diplomatic protocol and share his information with Rwanda\u2019s President\u2014the head of the party that Dallaire wanted to act against. Three months later, in April of 1994, everything that Dallaire described in his warning took place, and in the course of a hundred days around a million Tutsis were massacred.<\/p>\n