Word: annan
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...assured that no one will confuse U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s commencement address this June with Solzhenitsyn’s. Yet the relative timing of their Harvard speeches is somewhat analogous. To wit, just like Solzhenitsyn, Annan is speaking at a moment of his own apparent obsolescence...
Kofi Annan’s message to the Class of 2004 will likely be greeted with enthusiasm and self-aggrandizing applause. In our tiny corner of the universe, the United Nations embodies the highest morality—and Annan is the paladin of that morality...
...realities of the War on Terror, however, make Annan seem oddly anachronistic—as anachronistic as Solzhenitsyn seemed at Harvard 26 years ago. Annan is stuck in the mindset of the proverbial day before yesterday—or, more precisely, the mindset of Sept. 10. Naturally, he has sanctimonious reverence for the United Nations, considering it the definitive arbiter of U.S. foreign policy. As we have seen, such an exaggerated view of the United Nations can directly conflict with the ability of the United States to effectively combat the intersection of terrorists, outlaw regimes and weapons proliferation. In many...
...Annan has also shown a tendency to assume that peace is secured by paper or verbal promises from dictators. An eye-opening example of this came in Feb. 1998, when he traveled to Baghdad following Saddam Hussein’s obstruction of U.N. weapons inspectors. Annan smoked Cuban cigars with the Iraqi tyrant, praised him as a man of “courage” and a “builder,” and cut a deal to keep the inspections going. Before leaving, the secretary-general told a reporter that Iraq had been unfairly “demonized?...
...Accounting Office. One veteran U.N. reporter has predicted that “it could be the biggest financial crime in the history of humankind.” The scandal implicates, among others, U.N. Oil-for-Food executive director Benon Sevan, French and Russian oil contractors, and possibly even Kojo Annan, Kofi’s son. When all is said and done, the Oil-for-Food disgrace might be where the U.N.’s credibility meets its Waterloo...