KOFI’S ON THE CASE

In Deep Trouble (Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal, March 23rd, 2005)

"This hall has heard enough high-sounding declarations to last us for some decades to come," Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N. General Assembly Monday. "What is needed now is not more declarations and promises."

For announcing a U.N. reform program, it was a good start. Had Mr. Annan then apologized for the gross failure of his previous reforms, launched in 1997, and left the stage, there might be a lot more reason to hope the U.N. will shape up.

Instead, Mr. Annan went right on to deliver his latest plan for U.N. reform, by way of a 63-page report stuffed with high-sounding declarations wrapped around dozens of proposals to take most of what the U.N. does wrong, and do lots more of it, with lots more taxpayer money. Mr. Annan took the title for his report from a phrase in the U.N. charter, "In Larger Freedom." Truth in labeling would more accurately read: "In Deep Trouble." [...]

From there, Mr. Annan forges on to propose nothing less than reforming the entire known universe, via the U.N., while he bangs the drum for a budget to match. He wants to expand his own staff, change the world's climate, end organized crime, eliminate all private weapons, and double U.N.-directed development aid to the tune of at least $100 billion a year, "front-loaded," for his detailed plan to end world poverty. This comes from a U.N. that only three months ago was finally strong-armed by Congress into coughing up the secret internal Oil for Food audits confirming that under Mr. Annan's stewardship the U.N. was not even adequately auditing its own staff operations.

After a year in which scandals have been erupting from every vent in the U.N.'s traditionally cloistered corridors, assorted members of Congress have been wondering whether Mr. Annan deserves even the budget he's got already. Some, such as Sen. Norm Coleman, have called for Mr. Annan to resign. Now, in much the same way that despots faced with popular unrest like to announce giant patriotic dam-building projects involving the pouring of huge amounts of cement, Mr. Annan is presenting his new improved save-the-world reform plan, conveniently timed to serve as a distraction from the oil-for-fraud, sex-for-food, theft, waste, abuse and incompetence stories that for the past two years have bubbling up around the same U.N. he already reformed for us back in 1997. [...]

The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century. Mr. Annan's plan takes little practical account of a modern world in which competition, private enterprise and individual freedom are the principles of progress. He has his own agenda, which he would like the rest of us to follow and fund. The words sound lofty: "development, security, and human rights for all." The devil is in the details, and because this is a blueprint for the future of the entire earth, that means a lot of room for big trouble. This report is not a benign document.

We’ll be hearing a fair bit about UN reform in the months to come and it will be a mistake to take much of it seriously. What will it matter if it redefines terrorism, abolishes the Human Rights Commission, puts Japan on the Security Council or even takes away France’s veto? The UN is not just politically and financially corrupt, it is philosophically corrupt as well. At the very least it should be ignored benignly for a few decades until the generation running the place and their lickspittles in foreign ministries and NGO’s have passed on.