The Right's real intent is NEVER what they claim
Lynch Mob's Real Target Is the U.N., Not Annan
By James Traub
James Traub is writing a book about Kofi Annan and the U.N.
December 3, 2004
Kofi Annan must be wondering whose dog he shot. A right-wing mob is gathering around him, howling for his head. And why? Because the gentle and generally accommodating leader of the United Nations has, as New York Times columnist William Safire recently put it, "brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations" through mismanagement of the U.N.'s "oil-for-food" scandal. The secretary-general must have been surprised indeed to learn that Safire and the anti-U.N. crowd hold the organization's honor so dearly.
…The oil-for-food program was developed and directed not by U.N. civil servants but by the U.N. Security Council, as are all the organization's sanctions regimes. The diplomats who ran the program worked for the council's member states, including the United States and the four other permanent members. And they ran it according to the interests of those states, with the U.S. and Britain determined to prevent Iraq from importing items that could be used for military purposes and the French, Russians and Chinese equally determined to give the Iraqis the benefit of every doubt. Preventing theft was at the bottom of everyone's to-do list. The U.S. government had dozens of people monitoring the contracts but didn't hold back a single one on the grounds of corruption, price irregularities or kickbacks.
The secretariat deserves some portion of the blame, both for failing to sound the alarm over Iraqi swindling and for a slow and grudging reaction when the allegations first surfaced earlier this year. But the idea that this constitutes a firing offense for the secretary-general — especially when the call is coming from the folks who rallied to Donald Rumsfeld's side after Abu Ghraib — is hard to take seriously. I suspect that Annan's persecutors are after something else: not the man, but the institution itself.
