"If personal dignity and good intentions are enough to justify a long career, then Kofi Annan deserves all of the plaudits that he's received in the wake of his death at the age of 80.
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But the first line of The New York Times' lengthy and generally laudatory obituary, in which the paper noted that he 'projected himself and his organization as the world's conscience and moral arbiter despite bloody debacles that stained his record as a peacekeeper,' requires a response. The fact that Annan was far from the worst example of those who populated that moral cesspool makes his death an appropriate moment to evaluate the awful failures over which he presided. More than that, a serious discussion of what happened on his watch explains why the entire idea of global institutions has become discredited, despite the continued support it receives from much of the foreign-policy establishment and those associated with the Obama administration.
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Annan believed that his crowning achievement-and something that might perhaps justify the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize he shared with the United Nations as a whole-was a 2005 unanimous U.N. vote to accept the concept of 'the responsibility to protect.'...It was particularly ironic for Annan because it was during his time as the head of U.N. peacekeeping operations that genocides were allowed to happen without the world body or even Western governments that purport to care about the issue lifting a finger to help.
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Annan also was the man who presided over the 'oil for food' scandal-a shocking scam pulled off by his son, Kojo, who traded on his father's prestige in order to profit from crooked deals linked to humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering of those who lived in Saddam Hussein's Iraq when it was being sanctioned by the international community for the regime's crimes.
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The same piece points out that Annan also believed he had reformed the United Nations by replacing the corrupt and blatantly anti-Semitic Commission on Human Rights with a new Human Rights Council. The fact that the council turned out to be every bit as bad (if not worse) as the commission it replaced may not be Annan's fault. But it does speak volumes about the illusions that the foreign-policy establishment continues to hold about international institutions of this sort.
That's the worst thing about the plaudits for Annan. Both the U.N. bureaucracy and most of those who claim to be experts on foreign policy tend to confuse their endlessly expressed good intentions about making the world a better or more peaceful place for actually doing things to effectuate those goals..."