Why American neocons are out for Kofi Annan's blood

The author is none other than Robin Cook who quit Tony Blair's cabinet over his disagreement with Blair over the rationale given for going to war in Iraq. He was House of Commons leader, one of the highest profile figures in the Labour Party. For more info: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2857637.stm

Long article, worth the read.

The US is determined to derail the secretary general's progressive reforms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1449863,00.html
Robin Cook
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian

The debate on Darfur in the UN security council last night
is a salutary reminder that the only hope for peoples
abandoned by their own governments is an effective
international community.

It was a Labour government that hosted the conference
in postwar London that gave birth to the UN. Now this
Labour government has the opportunity to modernise it
by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan's blueprint for a
UN for this century.

The UN was founded in an era when most of its present
members were not independent states, and even fewer
were industrialised nations. Nearly all permanent
members got there because they were the victors of the
second world war. To this day Germany and Japan have
never overcome their initial exclusion as the losers, and
the new industrialised giants such as Brazil or India
remain in the waiting room.

Not one permanent member represents the Muslim world,
although developing a positive, tolerant relationship
between the west and Islam is one of the most pressing
security issues of our time. The obvious solution is for Egypt
or Indonesia to take one of the four new permanent seats
that the Annan package proposes for Africa and Asia.

and pretty satisfying.

Lying Neocon devils are everywhere.
I like this part:

This brings us to the solid concrete roadblock in the path of the Annan reforms. The world is confronted with a choice between two competing models of global governance. The direction signposted by Kofi Annan is to a regenerated UN with new authority for its collective decisions. However, collective decision-making is only possible if there is broad equivalence among those taking part. And there is the rub. The neocons who run the US administration want supremacy, not equality, for America and hanker after an alternative model of global governance in which the world is put to right not by the tedious process of building international consensus, but by the straightforward exercise of US puissance.

There are ways in which this power can be displayed more subtly than by dispatching an aircraft carrier. Over the past six months their influence has been deployed in heavy press briefing against Kofi Annan, to their shame faithfully taken up by rightwing organs in the British press.

There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who happened to be general secretary at the time.

Glad to have the particulars.

Accuse them of racism! Rat bastards!

and Facists too!

is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan , who happened to be general secretary at the time.

But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it. If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.

The eccentric selection of John Bolton as Bush's ambassador to the UN is consistent with such a strategy of sabotage rather than reform. His hostility to any constraint on US unilateralism is so deep, (and his life so sad), that he described his "happiest moment" signing the letter to Kofi Annan telling him that the US would have nothing to do with the international criminal court. His relish in the gesture is all the more revealing as the issue was not within the remit of his job, and he pleaded to be allowed to sign as a special favour.

In touch with reality?

Thank you for posting this.