Excellent piece from The Nation on Kofi Annan and the rw hate for him

I dont know how many of you subscribe to The Nation but i think this piece on Annan is very interesting.


The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan

by Ian Williams

Last June UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said of the media coverage of the so-called Oil for Food Scandal, "It's a bit like lynching, actually." By December the vigilantes were lining up, swinging their ropes. The neoconservative and paleoconservative assault on him and the UN has been like a slightly slower version of the Swift Boat veterans' campaign against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry--right down to the halfhearted and belated disavowals by George W. Bush.

Listening to the cable pundits, you would never suspect that there is no proof at this point that Annan, or indeed anyone else at the UN, did anything wrong. Charges of corruption against UN official Benon Sevan are suspect at best, given that they come via Ahmad Chalabi, who was also the source of the discredited information about Iraq's illusory weapons, as well as the assurances that Iraqis would greet US and British forces as liberators. Nor is there any evidence that Annan used his influence to give Cotecna, a company that employed his son, the job of monitoring contracts under the oil-for-food program, and no proof that Cotecna did anything illegal or corrupt. Although Annan's son certainly let his father down by not telling him of Cotecna's continuing "non-compete" payments to him, paternal resignations in response to the sins of prodigal sons have not been a great American tradition--certainly not under the Bush dynasty.

Much more at link: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050110&s=williams

I like this. We can have java-conservatives, homo-erectus conservatives, etc. I myself am a liberal sapien.

I can totally believe there is no proof of wrong-doing, because they are saying there has been, and everything they say is an out and out lie. What is even scarier is that everything they accuse someone else of they are doing themselves, so it's possible that Jenna and Barbara have been skimming off the oil for food program this entire time.

not much for pre-emptive war.