A decade of failure at the UN
December 12, 2006| By Nathaniel Ward
In what may be his final public speech as United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan yesterday ranted against America’s foreign policy and attacked the U.S.-led war on terror.
“It was a thinly veiled parting shot at U.S. foreign policy delivered by an embittered U.N. leader seething with self-righteous indignation and resentment,” Heritage foreign policy expert Nile Gardiner writes. “Annan’s Missouri speech will go down in history as one of the most blatant assaults on a U.S. administration by a serving U.N. official.”
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Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, says in a statement that “his departure from office has not come soon enough.”
Annan’s 10 years in power have been a monumental failure, and he leaves behind an institution whose standing could barely be lower, a testament to mismanagement, corruption and anti-Americanism. Annan has presided over many of the biggest scandals in the history of the world body, from the Oil-for-Food debacle to the peacekeeping abuse scandal in the Congo. The UN’s new Human Rights Council is an unmitigated farce, and the United Nations has largely jettisoned the cherished principles of liberty and freedom. Under Annan the UN has shamelessly appeased dictators and tyrants, from Baghdad to Tehran to Khartoum, and has stood weak-kneed in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The abuses are almost unbelievable: corruption, human rights failures, peacekeeping abuses—and the list goes on. “Today’s United Nations is a broken institution in fundamental need of wholesale reform,” Gardiner explains in his paper. “That is Annan’s legacy, and the United States and the world look forward to new leadership at Turtle Bay—leadership 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.”
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
