The UN-doing of Kofi Annan

Fareed Zakaria on the hypocricy of the Congressional mobs circling Kofi Annan.

Rwanda was a failure at almost every level, but certainly it was a failure of the United Nations. But let us be clear what we mean by that. It was the major powers—the United States, Britain, France—that determined the exact nature of the peacekeeping mission. It was they who insisted that the force stay neutral. (France's actions were even less edifying, since it was reportedly a big supplier of the Hutu Army.) The United Nations failed in Rwanda because we failed.

This logic holds even in the messy scandal over the Oil-for-Food Program, a badly managed affair surrounded by corruption. But who designed the Oil-for-Food Program? The United States and Britain. They wrote the rules that allowed Saddam Hussein to choose his trading partners, banks and consultants. They vetted every one of the 30,000 contracts that passed through the program. They held up 5,000 over concerns about materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction, but not one over concerns about corruption. Saddam's major revenues actually came from smuggling, which was an activity the United Nations was not mandated to stop. The only ones who could have stopped it were the ones with military force in the region—the United States and Britain. The truth is that Washington—during both the Clinton and the Bush years—cared little about Iraq's corruption. It cared only about its weapons.

Zakaria goes on to highlight the very real failings of the UN, particularly the bureaucratic stasis and the failure of its peacekeeping apparatus to keep pace with a world that has undergone vast changes since the end of the cold war.

But make no mistake, the recent drumbeats from Congress calling for Annan's head (I especially love Josh Marshall's description of Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) as "the front man wantwit") are transparent attempts to shift attention away from the US-created debacle that is Mess o'Potamia.