From Australia’s The Age:
…The whisper in Washington is that there were two losers on November 2. The first was John Kerry, who lost the election to President Bush. The second was [Kofi Annan, who] did all he could to help Senator Kerry, even telling the BBC in the week before the election that, in his opinion, the war in Iraq was illegal. The comment was designed to hurt Mr Bush, but it failed…
…According to investigators, Saddam Hussein ripped $US20 billion ($A26 billion) from the UN’s oil-for-food program under Mr Annan’s watch and used the money to strengthen his control of Iraq, just as sanctions were supposed to weaken his regime. It is further alleged that some UN staff – including the head of the oil-for-food program – were taking bribes from Saddam….it is alleged that a senior UN staffer regularly sexually harasses his staff and that Mr Annan dismissed complaints about it and that UN peacekeepers in the Congo have been demanding bribes in exchange for food, and raping and beating local women (and taking photographs of it). If that were not enough, Mr Annan’s own son is accused of making money from the oil-for-food program, by taking payments from a Swiss company that had a UN contract.
…Throughout the 1990s he was head of the UN’s peacekeeping office….Its most shocking failures were in Bosnia, where 20,000 men and boys were slaughtered after being abandoned by peacekeepers in so-called UN “safe” areas, and in Rwanda, where more than 800,000 people were hacked to death with no intervention. Mr Annan knew that a massacre in Rwanda was imminent. The head of the UN’s peacekeeping mission, Major-General Romeo Dallaire, sent him an urgent memo, practically begging him to intervene before the killings began.
…Given these facts, many were surprised when Mr Annan and the UN received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. Then again, it was not for making peace, but for “revitalising” the UN.
…He is sometimes call the “rock star” diplomat because he hangs out with people like Bono; he eats in New York’s best restaurants and lives with his second wife in a mansion formerly owned by the banker, J.P. Morgan’s family.
…On October 31, Mr Annan wrote to the US and Britain, urging them not to launch an assault on insurgents. Iraq’s interim Defence Minister, Hazem Sa’alan, scoffed. “Where was Kofi Annan when Saddam was slaughtering the Iraqis like sheep?”
Having Kofi Annan resign will not solve things, as the way the U.N. is designed will naturally attract and promote the worst kind of political scum like Annan. Fire Kofi Annan, and another corrupt bureaucrat will take his place. The U.N. organization by its very nature breeds corruption. The problem with the U.N. is its core principle that equates free capitalist countries as morally equal with slave-state socialist dictatorships. Given this principle, why should it come as a surprise that one finds the U.N. as internally as corrupt as the slave-states it appeases?
The U.S. should withdraw from the U.N. and establish a United Nations for Freedom where only nations that hold the rights of their individual citizens as sovereign are welcomed, and those that do not are unequivocally condemned.