KONSIDERING KOFI

The indispensable National Review Online has put up a Symposium on Kofi's aKomplishments. Go and Read the Whole Thing NOW. Here are some highlights:

Norm Coleman: Annan’s legacy will be one of missed opportunity and failed leadership at a time when the U.N. needed to play a critical role in the developing global community.

Niles Gardiner: His ten years in power have been a monumental failure, and he leaves behind an institution whose standing could barely be lower and a legacy that is a testament to mismanagement, corruption, and anti-Americanism. He is probably the worst secretary-general in the history of the United Nations, a staggering achievement considering the intense competition.

Pedro Sanjuan: Annan bribed the Volker commission with $34 million of Iraqi money to whitewash his complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal, the largest robbery in the annals of the U.N.

Brett Schaefer: Indeed, after years of talk and multiple reports on reform, the U.N. is little changed from the organization that allowed the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal, the despicable peacekeeping abuses in the Congo, and the extensive cases of fraud and abuse in pro­curement to occur.

Meanwhile, Anne Bayefsky has this:

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. With the defeat of Communism, there was a chance that the U.N. could come to be not the tool for developed to triumph over developing, — but the instrument that permitted democratization and the protection of human rights to step out from behind the shadows as the sine qua non of progress in our time. Instead, 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.

And let's close with what Claudia Rosett thinks should have been in Kofi's Soliloquy:

During my decade as secretary-general, and indeed for some time before that, I have indulged in more than my share of half-truths, quarter-truths, cover-ups, immoral inanities and staggering hypocrisies. I have shuffled paperwork while ignoring genocides, I have rushed to shake hands with tyrants while deriding democrats; I have suffered from memory gaps while adroitly recalling just enough to know what needs covering up.

I took office promising to reform the U.N., and instead produced a record that deserves to be summed up by such phrases as peacekeeper rape, procurement bribery, and Oil-for-Food.I have praised a “reformed” Human Rights Council that functions as a complete farce. I have demanded “peace” deals and pushed for a brand of morally blind diplomacy that has paved the way for a terrorist takeover of Lebanon, worsening turmoil in the Middle East, and a nuclear-armed Iran.

In contradiction of the U.N. charter, which describes my role as the U.N.’s “chief administrative officer,” I have styled myself, in my own phrase, as “chief diplomat of the world,” setting up a vast array of opaque trusts, projects, partnerships, and programs which have massively expanded the U.N. beyond any provisions for oversight, while providing me with opportunities for patronage, and places to park my cronies. At the same time, while entrusted with a budget of billions, and a world stage, I have shirked all responsibility for my own failures, shifting blame especially to the United States.

Truly, Kofi's appearance at the Truman Library defiled that monument to a great American President, and defiled the memory of what the United Nations might have become.