Kofi and U.N. 'Ideals' -- Rwanda, Dafur, Iraq and Oil for Food.

Sixty years ago, at the invitation of President Harry Truman, Winston Churchill delivered his historic Iron Curtain address in Fulton, Missouri, to warn Americans of the menace they faced in the Soviet Union. On Monday, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan gave his valedictory speech at the Truman Library in Independence to instruct Americans about the principles of global leadership and their need for the United Nations. The comparison says a lot about Mr. Annan's legacy and the current state of the U.N.

America, Mr. Annan said, "has historically been at the vanguard of the global human rights movements. . . . When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objects, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused." That was a slap at the Bush Administration, which must be wondering what it got from Mr. Annan after coming to his political rescue last year amid Paul Volcker's Oil for Food revelations. But leaving aside this foray into U.S. politics, how have Mr. Annan and the U.N. met their own "ideals and objects"?

The world's worst man-made humanitarian catastrophes have since taken place in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Congo and Darfur. Mr. Annan has been mostly silent about the first two, perhaps on the time-honored U.N. principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states other than the U.S. In the Congo, U.N. peacekeepers haven't stopped the bloodshed, but they have made themselves notorious as sexual predators.

Kofi Annan's Legacy of Failure
The Heritage Foundation ^ | 12/11/06 | Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.
Posted on 12/12/2006 10:33:58 PM EST by bruinbirdman
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1752636/posts

"..Questions also remain regarding Annan's appointment of German activist Achim Steiner as Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) just months after Steiner helped award Annan $500,000.[7]Steiner, whose four-year term of office began in June 2006, was part of a nine-member jury chaired by a senior U.N. official, which gave a cash gift to Annan last December. Annan's initial decision to accept such a huge prize (eventually given to charity), as well as his subsequent appointment of a man who had played a key role in the award of that money, gave the appearance of a major abuse of power. Both were extraordinary acts of political recklessness by the Secretary General and gave the impression that jobs at the world body may be traded for financial favors.

As an international public servant, the Secretary General should not accept money from a U.N. member state or a private foundation, either as an award or gift. He should also completely disclose his personal finances, as many Western politicians do. He should also abide by the same strict ethics and disclosure rules that apply to political figures in major democracies, such as in the United States and Great Britain. Annan has talked about accountability and transparency and the supposed winds of change sweeping through the U.N., but his own leadership has belied his words. Unfortunately, a secretive culture of impunity still dominates the upper echelons of the U.N. Secretariat.

A Broken Institution

In a recent interview with the London Daily Telegraph, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton described the U.N. as hopelessly out of touch and stuck in a Twilight Zone-style "time warp" where "there are practices, attitudes and approaches that were abandoned 30 years ago in much of the rest of the world."[8] Many Americans would agree with Mr. Bolton. In a March 2006 poll conducted by Gallup in the United States, 64 percent of respondents said the United Nations was "doing a poor job", the most negative rating for the U.N. in its history. Just 28 percent had a positive image of the U.N.'s job performance.[9]

Today's United Nations is a broken institution in fundamental need of wholesale reform. That is Annan's legacy, and the United States and the world looks forward to new leadership at Turtle Bayleadership that is untarnished by the taint of scandal and actually lives up to the ideals of the U.N.'s own Declaration of Human Rights. The U.N. needs a Secretary General who will seek real reform of the U.N. bureaucracy and aggressively stand up for democracy, human rights, and freedom.

Kofi Annan Is Most Responsible for Iraq
December 12, 2006
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_121206/content/truth_detector.member.html

RUSH: How about Kofi Annan? Kofi Annan went out to Missouri to deliver the first of his five farewell addresses. Now, you know, I actually think that Kofi Annan is probably the one person most responsible for the mess in Iraq. He ran an organization that didn't do diddly-squat over 16 or 17 resolutions. There were a gazillion threats, ten years of Barbra Streisand, ten years of BS, the oil-for-food program which propped Hussein up in power, allowed him to enrich himself along with Kofi Annan and his son, and who knows who else at the United Nations. If it hadn't been for Kofi Annan and the United Nations, Saddam Hussein would not have prospered, would not have been able to get away with threatening the world with his weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations sat by and literally did nothing while Saddam Hussein was thumbing his nose at the organization. All those resolutions, totally ignored, passed and ignored, which is the standard operating procedure of the UN.

[]The UN is never, ever to be judged on their results, they're only to be judged on their intentions, just like liberals demand for all of their programs. Even though the social do-gooder programs failed miserably, destroyed families, black families and poverty stricken families, our intentions were good, our hearts, at least we were trying to help. What were you doing? You were doing nothing. We were trying to help. Don't blame us. Same thing here.

Now Kofi Annan has the audacity to go out and blame the United States. President Bush just had a farewell dinner for him at the White House. It boils down to something as simple as manners. And the left has none, from Ted Kennedy being invited to the White House to screen a movie about his brother JFK and the Cuban missile crisis with the popcorn machine going, scotch bottle open; to being allowed to write the education bill, any number of Democrats have been wooed. This president has done his best, particularly in the first term. And they just treated him with mean -- just mean, it's just plain and simple mean. Kofi Annan, the same thing. He was given a farewell dinner, and I read that he was being given a farewell dinner by Bush. And I said why? Then I realized that it's the office. Bush takes the office seriously. This is something the presidency does when a UN secretary general retires or moves on.

I find this whole scenario reprehensible. Kofi Annan, head of an organization that exists to pick the pockets of Americans, that exists to cut America down to size; that exists to not solve one single problem. Every time there's a major problem, who does the UN call? It's us. We do our level best to fix these problems and what do we get? Nothing. No gratitude, no appreciation, just a bunch of lip from a bunch of socialist thugs, dictators, communists, and tyrants led by an inept, incompetent boob who can't even pronounce words correctly half the time. But something he said yesterday, I'm surprised, literally surprised that nobody has picked up on this. To a headline reader or a drive-by journalist, you might think that Kofi Annan did the same old same old, a very undiplomatic critique of the United States. But if you parse his message, he cited the "farsighted leadership in the Truman tradition." The farsighted leadership in the Truman tradition; American leadership in the Truman tradition? Harry Truman was both famous and controversial for ending a war with a bold decision -- in fact, two bold decisions: dropping an A bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki. That was the farsighted American leadership in the Truman tradition. And let's talk about Korea.

Harry Truman ended a war in a decisive fashion, the only president to ever order the use of an atomic bomb. So I'm wondering if Kofi Annan was actually hinting that we should drop a couple of nukes on Iran and anywhere else there's a problem in the world, solve it in the Truman tradition, more Hiroshimas, more Nagasakis.

Read the Background Material at this hot link: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

(Townhall: Kofi Annan Bashes U.S. in Farewell Speech)
(NRO: Annan’s Legacy)
(NRO: Anann should have said something entirely different at the Truman Library)

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