Free Republic

The triumph of the therapeutic over the tragic. Everyone seems to take some joy in listening to outgoing secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, especially during the holidays. But just as with other such ethicists as a lip-biting Bill Clinton or creased-browed Jimmy Carter, Annan is as publicly acclaimed as he is privately ignored. We like such itinerant moralists — more when they are off the job than on, and always in retrospect rather than contemporaneously. As we watch them hedge, we somehow feel apologetic rather than outraged over their latest deception. The secretary-general — introduced with fulsome praise...

United Nation's Chief Kofi Annan's Legacy of Failure by Nile Gardiner (December 16, 2006) http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4867 United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his swan song last week at the Truman Presidential Library in Missouri.[1] It was a thinly veiled parting shot at U.S. foreign policy delivered by an embittered U.N. leader seething with self-righteous indignation and resentment. Annan's Missouri speech will go down in history as one of the most blatant assaults on a U.S. administration by a serving U.N. official. In his condescending remarks, Annan warned, with Washington clearly in his sights, that "no nation can make itself secure...

UN chief wronged U.S., coddled dictators and ignored corruption Some people go out in style. On Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan bade farewell by biting the American hand that has fed him for the last decade. Kofi's American swan song, delivered at the Truman Library in Missouri, was a condescending piece of finger-wagging from a discredited diplomat who can barely disguise his contempt for American foreign policy. One low-light: his declaration that Washington's position in the "vanguard of the global human-rights movement...can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When...

(CNSNews.com) - It may not rival Hugo Chavez' vitriol at the United Nations, but Kofi Annan's "farewell speech" in Missouri on Monday is expected to be a parting shot at President Bush, USA Today reported. Annan "will accuse the administration of trying to secure the United States from terrorism in part by dominating other nations through force, committing what he termed human rights abuses and taking military action without broad international support," the report said

By SALIM MANSUR United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is a prime example, I wrote last week, of Peter's Principle -- "an individual in a hierarchical organization rises to the level of his incompetence" -- at work. Now, just weeks before his departure from the United Nations, Annan revealed how utterly depraved his politics are when he stated in a BBC interview Iraq is now worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. Annan is of course the ethically void Secretary-General under whose watch the Oil-for-Food program, with Iraq's old regime, turned out to be the worst financial scam in the history...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Lebanese authorities on Thursday to take a lesson from the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah and quickly agree on a plan for disarming Hezbollah. Hezbollah's transformation into a purely political party "is a key element in ensuring a permanent end of hostilities and in the full restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence," Annan said in a report to the U.N. Security Council. "It is my deep hope that the opportunities borne from conflict will be seized upon and that Lebanon may once again rise from the...