There’s Nothing Good To Be Said About Kofi Annan Or His Replacement

14 Dec, 2006 by John Hawkins

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It seems that the United Nations is upset that National Review Online roughed up Kofi Annan:

“Contributors to the Annan-hate-a-thon range the ideological gamut from fellows of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to the Heritage Foundation. But it is the Hudson Institute’s Anne Bayefsky who hurls the most over-the-top criticism:

“Kofi Annan will forever be remembered as the secretary-general who presided over the biggest and most insidious hijacking of the global agenda which has ever occurred. … over a decade with Kofi Annan at the helm, the U.N. has become an instrument of terror. A place which has no definition of terrorism because the terrorists and their allies run it, while democracies pay the bill.” (Emphasis added)

One has to wonder what part of the terrorist agenda is served by eradicating polio, running war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, administering elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, and keeping the peace in Haiti and the Congo?

More to the point, for the past four years right wing critics like Bayefsky have used Annan as a whipping boy to vent their innate hostility to multilateral platforms like the United Nations. My only question is how long it will take the Bayefsky crowd to turn Ban Ki-moon, who takes over from Annan in January, into a boogeyman of the right. I don’t imagine it takes much time. For all along, it was not Annan they hated, but the very idea of the United Nations.”

The UN is a corrupt, anti-semitic, anti-American, talking shop that makes it more, not less, difficult to tackle bad actors across the world. As an institution, the UN does a lot of harm and a very minimal amount of good and were it to completely disappear tomorrow, the world would be better off.

As to Ban Ki-moon, we don’t have to wait for him to get in office to, “turn on him.” The very fact that he could be chosen to run an organization like the UN means he’s likely cut out of the same worthless stock as Annan. In other words, it’s really not much different than one Mafia Don retiring and another taking his place. You know, just because of the fact that he’s a Mafia Don, that he’s bad actor.