Time For a Kofi Break

Glenn Reynolds writes a guest ed by that name in the Wall Street Journal today. (Paid site -- you gotta subscribe!) That's notable in itself, a leading figure in the blog community is writing for a leading MSM publication, if on the renegade and new-media-friendly Editorial Page.

Glenn gets the chance to push the most awesome undercurrent that the blogosphere has ever pondered: replacing Kofi Annan with former Czech President Vaclav Havel. It’s outrageous to think of a towering leader of peace and freedom at the helm of the U.N. But why?

Reynolds starts by enumerating the present Annan/UN scandals and failures:

• Rape and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers haven't gotten the kind of attention they'd get if American troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll.


• the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose -- the "never again" treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed after Cambodia and Rwanda -- is looking less and less credible in the wake of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur.


• the U.N. has so far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis.

Havel?

But however you assess Mr. Havel's chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan the comparison is devastating. Mr. Havel, after all, is a hero on behalf of freedom: A man who helped bring about the end of communist dominance in Eastern Europe, despite imprisonment and the threat of death -- a man who could write that "Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force." Mr. Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them.

If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it's even more damning to the U.N. Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, "So far, you . . . have chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances . . . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power." One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy.

I know, a freedom lover at the UN is a longshot. But Condi is coming in to shake things up, and SecGen Annan is bound for an ignominious resignation -- there will never be a better chance.

Posted by jk at November 29, 2004 08:55 AM