Best of Times, Worst of Times: The Fortunes of the United Nations in the Middle East

The overabundance of crises that radiate continually from the Middle East confront the United Nations with its most enduring challenge. Kofi Annan is not the first secretary-general to grapple with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict⎯along with the interrelated clashes of the Gulf region, the more distant but no less ominous civil wars in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia, the Pakistan-India tensions, the growth of radical Islamic-inspired terrorism, and the instabilities reaching from North Africa to the Himalayas. The Middle East problem is, after all, the longest running conundrum facing the United Nations.