Israel Commentary

Kofi Annan, Our Latest Spiritualist

Excerpted from great article by Martin Peretz, The New Republic, March 3, 2003

NOT SINCE THAT LOFTY SPIRITUALIST, Dag Hammarskjold has there been a U.N. secretary-general whom the worthy have so taken to their bosoms. A great moral aura attaches to Kofi Annan, even though—as a lesser U.N. official in both bloody Bosnia and bloodier Rwanda—he kept armed multinational forces under his command from impeding the macabre work of mass murderers. But, at the Secretariat, the salient comparisons are to ex-Nazi KurtWaldheim. So it is not surprising that Annan considers himself the embodiment of all that is virtuous in world affairs.

Hammarskjold claimed to "represent the detached element in the international life of the peoples." Annan is not so abstract, but he does annex to his person the interests of everyone. Speaking for "the international community as a whole," he admonishes the United States and its allies that "there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations Security Council. "And so he does not want the American- and British-led alliance to remove Saddam Hussein unless the French, Germans, and Russians assent.

IT'S A STRANGE BUNCH ON WHICH TO RELY for ethical validation. These are the same governments, after all, that for years conspired with Saddam to get the Security Council to abrogate its sanctions against his regime—that is, to rescue him from the legal consequences of the Gulf war formulated by the Security Council itself. And it was their companies that provided Saddam with perilous chemicals, biologicals, and maybe even nuclear know-how.

It is an intellectual scam for the Security Council and the secretary-general to charge the United States with endangering the United Nations when it is they, through their years of appeasement, who have made the world organization an object of justifiable ridicule. …