Things are going badly for Kofi Annan. The oil-for-food scandal has revealed U.N. behavior regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq that ranges from criminally inept to outright corrupt. Rape and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers haven't gotten the kind of attention they'd get if American troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll. And the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose -- the "never again" treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed after Cambodia and Rwanda -- is looking less and less credible in the wake of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur. And finally, the U.N. has so far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis.
Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan's resignation, amid talk of former Czech President Vaclav Havel as successor. ("Havel for Secretary General" bumper stickers are on the Web.) But however you assess Mr. Havel's chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan the comparison is devastating...Mr. Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them.
If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it's even more damning to the U.N. Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, "So far, you . . . have chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances . . . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power." One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy. |