Kofi's slide downwards...

Jeff Jacoby has an interesting editorial in the Boston Globe today. He cites Glen the Puppy Blender and mentions his minor efforts at blogging (Instapundit) but doesn't link to it... Harrumph - typical Main Stream Media thouroughness... Anyway, the article is of interest: bq. Annan is a symptom of UN's sickness... KOFI ANNAN has had better weeks. On Monday, the UN secretary general woke up to a Wall Street Journal column by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, publisher of the influential InstaPundit website, urging that he be replaced by Vaclav Havel, the much-admired former president of the Czech Republic. bq. In The New York Times, op-ed eminence William Safire reviewed the revelations that link the massive oil-for-food scandal to Annan's own family: Until this year, his son Kojo was getting monthly payments from a firm that had a major oil-for-food contract with the UN -- even though he'd left the company in 1998. The corruption enveloping the UN will not begin to dissipate, Safire wrote, until Annan resigns, "having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations." bq. Meanwhile, the latest National Review was out, with its cover photo of Annan and the headline, in large red letters: "You're Fired!" An editorial inside insisted that "Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not," while an essay by Nile Gardiner, a former aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, explained why "Kofi's hour is up." With his record, Gardiner observed, "if Annan were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company . . . he would have been forced to resign months ago." bq. On Wednesday came another call for Annan's ouster, this one from the chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has amassed evidence that Saddam Hussein used stolen oil-for-food dollars to underwrite terrorism and suborn at least one senior UN official. It is "abundantly clear" that Kofi Annan should resign, Senator Norm Coleman said. "As long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks, and under-the-table payments that took place under the UN's collective nose." Jeff goes on to cite a bunch of other examples of the United Nations failures and goes on to close with these three short, brilliant paragraphs: bq. The UN is a corrupt institution, one that long ago squandered whatever moral legitimacy it had. The UN's founding documents venerate justice and human rights, but for the past 40 years, the organization has been dominated by a bloc of states -- essentially the Afro-Asian Third World -- most of whose governments routinely pervert justice and violate human rights. bq. Inside the United Nations, there is no difference between a dictatorship or a democracy: Each gets exactly one vote in the General Assembly. The reason the UN indulges vicious regimes like those in North Korea, Syria, and Cuba is that they are members in good standing, and most other governments lack the courage to cross them. The UN cannot be fixed unless that changes -- and that isn't going to change. bq. Cynicism, hypocrisy, bigotry -- these are the hallmarks of the modern UN. The free peoples of the world, and those yearning to breathe free, deserve better. And what would be better? I'll take up that question in a future column. So true - the relevance of this organization is shot. Time to shut the Security Council down like its predecessor the League of Nations and spin off the few small committees that actually do good work...