The U.N.’s Steep Decline

Jim Phillips and Nile Gardner of the Heritage Foundation have torn apart Kofi Annan’s jibe that the war in Iraq was “illegal.”

A small sample of a piece that I recommend be read in its entirety:

Kofi Annan’s ill-considered jibe undercuts efforts to stabilize postwar Iraq that have been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. It stigmatizes the embryonic Iraqi government, while strengthening the hand of Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists determined to strangle democracy in Iraq and inflict a defeat on the U.S.-led, U.N.-backed security force in the country…. Annan’s statement that the war was “illegal” is both false and spurious…”

Phillips and Gardner believe Annan’s statement was, in part, designed to indirectly affect the U.S. elections. They add:

The U.N. Secretary-General’s gratuitous comments were an extraordinarily undiplomatic and inappropriate intervention from a world figure who is supposed to be a neutral servant of the international community. They raise serious questions about Annan’s judgment and his suitability to continue in his post… The U.N. is a world body in steep, possibly terminal decline, struggling for relevance in the 21st Century, and Mr. Annan’s remarks only further underline his organization’s growing impotence.

The Heritage Foundation was sounding the alarm about the U.N. decades before doing so was fashionable. We’d be wise to listen to what its experts say now.



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