A war averted.

• Author: Lone, Salim
• Position: United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's negotiations with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein

In an eerie reprise, January 1998 in the Middle East was unfolding just the way January 1991 had, heading inexorably to war. As in 1991, the world now was demanding Iraqi compliance with forceful Security Council resolutions; Iraq was insisting on a speedy end to sanctions (and inspections); and the United States was leading the deployment in the Persian Gulf of a fearsome armada it indicated it had every intention of unleashing if Iraq did not resume mandated cooperation with UN weapons inspectors.

And United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan - who was shortly to assert that "for the United Nations, there is no higher goal, no deeper commitment and no greater ambition than preventing armed conflict" - was preparing for a momentous journey to Baghdad, pretty much as the then Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar had done seven years earlier in a similar but ultimately unsuccessful bid to avert war.

The stakes for both human life and international security were no less now than in 1991. Indeed, in the view of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, they were much higher: the eruption of conflict this time would lead to a "world war", he said, referring to the highly-charged political opposition in the Middle East to an attack on Iraq.

Into this very combustible environment stepped Kofi Annan, determined despite the very heavy odds to risk for peace his own prestige and standing in the hope of finding a formula out of war. In the face of rigid bilateral positions and the no-less rigid Security Council resolutions which allowed him virtually no room for manoeuvre, leave alone concession, it was altogether unclear how the Secretary-General could succeed in his quest. But in the now-famed private three-hour negotiating session, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Mr. Annan reached a breakthrough agreement which averted war - a war which quite a few commentators were saying would have been catastrophic for United States interests in the Middle East.

History had been made: no other statesman in memory, leave alone a United Nations Secretary-General with his severely proscribed mediating authority, had so dramatically averted a war which had all but started.

It is the kind of history that becomes legend in time. But while the focus has been primarily on fears that the agreement might unravel, the much more important point is that if it holds, it could transform the political landscape of the Middle East and bring an end to the devastating sanctions...