The Road to Hell

At least one good thing will happen the moment the clock strikes midnight on 2006 - Kofi Annan will no longer be Secretary-General of the United Nations.

A new book about Annan, from author James Traub, is called "The Best Intentions". Presumably, this is supposed to sum up Annan's performance - no matter what happened under his watch, his actions were taken with the best intentions.

Traub should have called the book "Good Intentions" as in the old saying, " the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Annan's Reign of Error and Support of Terror has been an abysmal failure by any standards, unless of course you're a tinpot dictator, an African warlord or religious leader of an arab thugocracy. During his term as UN Sec-Gen, we have seen well-publicized genocides in Sudan and Bosnia along with the usual assortment of human rights violations across the globe. This is added to the UN's complete inability to live up to even its simplest commitments to human rights, the oil-for-food scandal that involved at least one of his own family members and the full-scale use of the security council as an arena to prevent work from being done rather than to reach any kind of reasonable consensus. All this while the assorted delegates to the UN continued to treat New York as though it were Daytona Beach and they were college frat boys on a spring break blowout.

Before he was sec-gen, Annan gave a glimpse of his ability by overseeing the Rwanda genocide, so no one should really have been too surprised.

Of course, he did smile and make nice for the cameras with more dictators and murderers than any person in history, so he does have that going for him. And, he'll forever be remembered fondly by all Israel-haters for his love of bashing the Jewish state and ignoring Arab atrocities. If he'd put even one-tenth the effort towards stopping the massacre in Sudan, something might actually have been done.

Annan took an organization that was already failing to uphold its principles and proceeded to crush it mercilessly into the ground as though he was playing the lead role in the Godzilla vs. Bambi movie.

I think the UN is finished. I don't see how anyone with an iota of intelligence can look at the way that body operates and consider it healthy for the people of this planet.

The new UN Sec-Gen has his work cut out for him. But, he can look at the bright side: it's like being head coach of the Detroit Lions...no one expects anything but total failure.