In 1997, Richard Butler, an Australian diplomat specialising in disarmament issues, was appointed executive director of UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission charged with finding and destroying Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of atomic, biological and chemical weaponry. This book is his account of his failure to achieve that aim, and of the reasons behind that failure, which are chiefly two: the endless obstructionism of the Iraqi dictator and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and a degree of manoeuvring inside the UN apparatus itself which Butler claims fatally undermined his position. The upshot is that, even after a second punitive action against Iraq and a harsh regime of sanctions, Saddam is still in situ and, German reports suggest, within three years of full nuclear weapon capability. The diplomatic stalemate which has facilitated this deplorable situation, Butler suggests, indicates that the real contours of the post-Cold War world are very little different from those that preceded them.