Free Republic

There has rarely been a more outrageous piece of political grandstanding. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent article in The Washington Post was a pathetic attempt to claim credit for political and economic developments in Iraq. It was an extraordinary re-writing of history that would have made officials in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth blush. His op-ed made no mention of the role the United States and Britain played in liberating the people of Iraq, or of the presence of some 160,000 U.S., British and Coalition forces who are defending democracy and freedom in the country. This striking omission insults the...

The “core group” of nations announced by US President George W. Bush to channel aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami will be dissolved on Thursday after only eight days as the United Nations takes control of the international relief effort, delegates to a donors summit said on Wednesday. Mr Bush's initiative on December 29 - which at first included only the US, India, Japan and Australia - appeared to have been prompted by an accusation by Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief coordinator, that the response of wealthy nations had been “stingy”. The UN was included the next...