The Next UN-Kofi By Joseph Klein September 19, 2006 FrontPageMagazine.com Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=24448 During the next several weeks, the UN General Assembly will vote on Kofi Annan’s successor as Secretary General. The Security Council has been examining a number of candidates and is preparing its recommendation for the General Assembly. They should carefully examine Kofi Annan’s record and make sure to choose someone as unlike him as possible if they want the United Nations to have any chance of success. In short, we need someone who will be the un-Kofi at the UN. Kofi Annan spent virtually his whole professional career cosseted in the UN establishment. He became the first Secretary General to rise through the bureaucratic ranks of the UN. In turn, he has looked out for the interests of the Secretariat bureaucracy before the interests of the member states. The next Secretary General must come from outside the UN establishment. In order to be credible, the candidate must have experience in the real world and the perspective that goes with it. Two patterns emerge from Kofi Annan’s career, which have continued to the present day and exemplify what is wrong with the United Nations’ culture — self-protection and self-importance. These are two destructive traits that cannot be tolerated in the next Secretary General.   Failure during Kofi Annan’s regime has been rewarded with promotions as long as the UN insiders display absolute loyalty to protect the UN organization where they work from the real consequences of each others’ actions. Corruption and mismanagement have been regular features during Annan’s tenure because his first instinct as the UN’s chief administrator has always been to circle the wagons when any problems with his organization or personnel came to light. The Oil for Food scandal – involving Annan’s own son Kojo and some of his top deputies – is the most obvious example.   Way too much of our hard-earned money is simply wasted on a bloated UN bureaucracy that continues to protect itself from accountability and performance-based management. Annan showed his true feelings about the need for real reforms at the United Nations when he complained at a press conference he held on December 14,1998: “I think we should be allowed to focus on our work and not face constant harassment of reform, reform, reform. We have done enough. It is an ongoing process. We want to focus on our essential tasks.”   What are these “essential tasks”? They mostly consist of endless studies and a myriad of committee meetings and global conferences set up to address problems that the UN establishment thinks only the United Nations has the capability and moral legitimacy to address.   Only under unrelenting pressure from major dues-paying nations such as the United States and Japan has Annan proposed some reforms, but he did not lobby very hard for them after many free-riding undeveloped countries pushed back. And Annan has utterly failed to lead by example. Even as recently as this past week he had failed to fill out an annual financial disclosure form that was required of his staff, which only surfaced when a reporter raised the issue at a press conference.   The next Secretary General cannot be ethically challenged nor blind to incompetence like his predecessor. He or she must be a role model, who has zero tolerance for corruption, nepotism and mismanagement.   Kofi Annan’s entire UN career has also demonstrated his arrogance, based on his self-perception of moral superiority. Annan worked virtually his entire adult life in an insular environment inhabited by like-minded people who believed that the United Nations was the only true path to world peace and prosperity. In Annan’s own words, the United Nations is vested with “unique legitimacy.” Yet when the United Nations as an institution fails to even reach common definitions of aggression and terrorism more than sixty years after its founding, let alone deal with them effectively, Annan turns around and blames the member states. But he cannot have it both ways. The United Nations has no unique legitimacy to deal with threats to international peace and security, because the UN represents nothing more than the collective will of a group of disparate states with varied interests, including many authoritarian regimes that make up the majority of the General Assembly’s membership.   Kofi Annan’s answer to this conundrum has been to appease some of the world’s worst dictators and state sponsors of terrorism and to confer the UN’s “unique legitimacy” on them in order to show how ‘fair’ he is. So, for example, he declared that Saddam Hussein was someone “I think I can do business with” (which, in a sense, the UN did via the looting of the Oil-for-Food program in which its staff participated). He referred to the Islamic-fascist regime in Iran as a “partner” in negotiations. He has shaken hands and been photographed with Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nassrallah and with Iran’s megalomaniac President Ahmadinejad, who plans to return the favor by attending the General Assembly’s current session in New York. And Annan has just attended the U.S.-bashing Non-Aligned Movement conference in Cuba, where – in his words - he wanted “to pay special tribute to President Fidel Castro” and was photographed with the beaming dictator. . Annan also pushed for the new dysfunctional Human Rights Council as a replacement for the widely discredited Commission for Human Rights. With no threshold eligibility requirements for membership, this farcical organization with members like China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia has taken up where the old Commission left off. Its overwhelming focus for human rights condemnation so far has been on the only functioning democracy in the Middle East – Israel.   The next Secretary General must throw away the blinders that Kofi Annan has been wearing all these years. He or she must come to grips with the fact that no rational democracy, especially the United States, is going to entrust its security to a world organization that has proven time and again its inability to deal with grave threats to peace and has allowed itself to be used by aggressors in perversion of the United Nations’ founding principles. In short, the next Secretary General must stand squarely with the forces of freedom against threats from the Islamic-fascists and their allies. Annan-style equivocation is not an option.   The leading contender to replace Annan is reportedly Ban Ki-moon, a career diplomat who has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea since January 2004. In a second straw poll taken by the Security Council on September 14th of the candidates seeking to become the next UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon came in first. Of course, his record must be carefully examined but preliminary indications are promising. Ban Ki-Moon has been on the front-lines in trying to deal diplomatically with the nuclear tyrannical menace to the north, so he knows first-hand the stakes involved in defending democracy. He has worked extensively with the United Nations and knows its operations, but he is not a product of its bureaucracy. He has experience in dealing with other multilateral organizations and initiatives. And his reputation for integrity does not appear to have been tarnished by recent government scandals.   What counts in the end is whether Ban Ki-Moon or any other serious candidate for Secretary General has the backbone to speak truth to power, denounce the Islamic-fascists who export terror all around the world and firmly distinguish between right and wrong. If it is not already too late to save the United Nations after the devastation of Kofi Annan’s squandered rule, the next Secretary General will have one last, scant chance to restore the UN to its founding principles.