Good riddance to failed UN "leader"

Washington Times:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called yesterday for the United States to respect international norms, pointedly contrasting Bush administration policies in Iraq with the values that made America great.
In one of his last major speeches before leaving office, Mr. Annan also warned that military measures and other steps in the war on terrorism were leaving U.S. allies "troubled and confused."
...
But retiring Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican and chairman of the House International Relations Committee, suggested Mr. Annan was simply trying to divert attention from the United Nations' own management failures.
Mr. Annan's "failure to accept any responsibility for a decade of U.N. scandals" is "both understandable and completely predictable," said Mr. Hyde, whose committee extensively investigated the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.
U.N. officials began touting the speech to reporters last week, aware of its potential impact in Washington.
Mr. Annan's deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, incurred harsh criticism when he suggested earlier this year that the U.S. government was not doing enough to defend the organization against its critics.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Annan urged the United States to apply its own founding principles in its international dealings.
"The U.S. has given the world an example of a democracy in which everyone, including the most powerful, is subject to legal restraint," he said. "Its current moment of world supremacy gives it a priceless opportunity to entrench the same principles at the global level."
...

For the leader of a failed organization that failed to get compliance from Iraq to criticize the liberation of the Iraqi people from a genocidal despot just demonstrates how out of touch his leadership has been. I guess he was missing the cash flow from Saddam's oil for palaces program. What the US has done in Iraq is something noble. It has given the Iraqis an opportunity for freedom and democracy. That is one of our founding principals. This speech may be the most utterly ridiculous one by a UN diplomat in history and their is pretty stiff competition on that regard. As for his favored multilateral approach, tell that to the people dying in Darfur while the multilateralist wring their hands and watch. And, what is the multilateral answer to the genocide in Zimbabwe caused by teh racist policies of Mugabe? Both of these places in Africa would benefit from regime change and liberation, but one thing is for sure, they cannot count on the UN and its pedophile brigades to do anything constructive.

The New York Post has an editorial on Annan's ugly exit.

...

On an equally bizarre note, Annan yesterday proclaimed that all of the U.N.'s member nations "solemnly accepted" the "shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

As in, again, Darfur?

Please.

Clearly, Annan hopes to confuse his listeners by ignoring the real problems facing the United Nations - and to evade his proper share of the blame for its descent into a cesspool of corruption and incompetence.

...

There is more to his sorry record.

Jules Crittenden has a hilarious "translation" of the Annan speech.