While barely registering a ripple in the Mainstream Media, several key senior people have been "resigned" by Kofi Annan in the wake of a series of scandals. The sudden departures also follow a Manhattan meeting with liberal friends of Annan's from the foreign policy establishment,we read about that here at Rantburg
and a meeting between Annan and Bush Administration officials in Washington. There may be more than meets the eye in this sequence of developments.
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Annan has spent his entire career at the UN, and is the first Secretary-General in history to have risen through its ranks to the top.
I didn't realize that.
Annan the apparatchik has been the willing puppet for these worthies. The ongoing revelations in the oil-for-food scandal have constituted a proverbial thread being pulled, which is unraveling the cloak which has shielded much of the UN from public scrutiny for decades. In the last few months we have seen a passel of disgraceful scandals revealed from Turtle Bay. [...Congo ... sex-for-food racket. ...UN High Commissioner for Refugees ... accused of sexual harassment. ...UN Refugee and Works Agency ...aware Hamas on ...UN payroll.] These disgraces follow upon previous scandals. [Durban Conference...submitting the issue of Israel's security barrier to the International Court of Justice.... Annan...complicit in the genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia by his refusal to act ...attempts to hide his negligence or obstructionism in those two massive slaughters.] His feckless response to the genocide in the Sudan seemed almost to be an attempt at a mass slaughter hat trick.
Actually, Annan may have already achieved that dubious hat trick by permitting Saddam Hussein to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people with nary a response from the Secretary General. The oil-for-food scandal was just the apotheosis of trends that have been gaining strength in the UN during Annan's reign: a sense of lawlessness and corruption, lethally combined with an utter lack of accountability, that pervades the UN and has caused great harm throughout the world. For a more complete list, those with abundant time on their hands are directed to google and these three search terms: scandal, UN, Annan.
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Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) and Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) have been among the Republican leaders in Congress trying to bring to light the facts behind the oil-for-food scandals. President Bush has challenged the UN to hold true and fast to its founding principles, peace, democracy, the prevention of genocide, if it is to remain relevant. There have been calls in Congress to cut funding to the United Nations unless ameliorative steps are taken. A recently established group, Move America Forward , is beginning a television advertising campaign urging the United States throw UN out of the United States.
!!!
| Nice idea, but I think it's too early. Then again, I thought the Orange Revolution was too early, too, so don't take my word for it... |
Annan's cabinet will be left in tatters. While the Washington Post and the New York Times report on departures from the CIA and George Bush's Cabinet with an unseemly avidity, there has been a wall of silence regarding the mass exodus from the United Nation. Leaving aside the issue of media bias, what does this sequence of events say about Kofi Annan? That he would willingly sacrifice his friends and allies to preserve his title. That a man who has presided over the perversion of the UN is so frightened of exposure that he gleefully throws out to the lions people he has worked with closely over the years without accepting any personal responsibility himself. After all, these problems festered under his reign. Only pressure from George Bush and some key Congressmen has prompted him to take these steps towards reform.
We probably should never expect more from a man who, during his entire career at the United Nations, has been sacrificing and subverting the very principles and goals upon which the United Nations was founded: the spread of democracy, freedom and peace throughout the world. Throughout his rise in the UN bureaucracy, he willingly dispensed with these noble goals. He has diminished the stature of the United Nations. He has made it an accomplice in the greatest swindle in the history of the world. And he has made it an actor in genocides on two different continents. He has irreparably harmed the United Nations. So should we be surprised that he offers up others to keep his job? Why not add a few friends to the funeral pyre?