 In eight years as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan has come as close to superstardom as a diplomat can get -- lauded on the cover of Time, sharing the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the organization he leads and becoming known as the "secular pope" for his advocacy for peace and the poor.
| AB, couldja bring a couple cases of insulin from the back room? I think it's next to the Stegmaier quarts. I think we're gonna need it in a paragraph or two... |
But now an internal inquiry and no fewer than six congressional panels are examining evidence of influence-peddling in the Iraq oil-for-food program. A series of financial and sexual misconduct scandals have implicated some of Annan's closest advisers. Conservative Republicans have called for Annan's resignation and threatened to withhold U.S. funding. And the United States has disputed his claim that a report by the U.N. oil-for-food inquiry had exonerated him.
| Guess it depends on your interpretation of the word "exonerate," huh? |
"The honeymoon has ended rather brutally," said Shashi Tharoor, a senior U.N. official who has served with Annan for more than a decade.
| Ten years of fine lunching, fine wines, and young and supple babes... Very young and very supple... |
Tharoor and other Annan supporters say the secretary general's legacy will ultimately eclipse the current controversy.
But others -- not only in Congress, but also in the United Nations -- say the record raises fundamental questions about his judgment and integrity.
| ... and about the Emperor's choice in wardrobes... |
At the moment, Annan's situation is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy:
| What? He's taking it up the kazou? |
The same qualities that powered his rise -- a passion for compromise, a desire to please the most powerful U.N. states and an intense loyalty to an inner circle of bureaucrats -- can also be seen as contributing to his decline.
Some members of his inner circle have abused their authority, and his efforts to patch up relations with the United States have undermined his standing with other U.N. members.
| That's only fair. His efforts to please the dictators and potentates undermined his standing with the U.S. |
He has sought to regain his balance in recent weeks, prodding the Security Council to act more decisively on war crimes in Sudan and launching initiatives to restructure or restore accountability to a number of U.N. agencies. But even his power to change the institution has come into question. "My feeling is that Kofi has shrunk in stature somewhat in the last year," said Stephen C. Schlesinger, director of the New School's World Policy Institute and a former U.N. adviser, who still considers him the world's "moral authority."
| Stephen doesn't set the bar very high. Either that, or he's been at the bar for too long... |
Even as Annan's new chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, has taken steps to restore confidence in the United Nations, Schlesinger said, some of these steps have "given the impression that Kofi is kind of losing control."
| There's more at the link, some of it high comedy... |
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