The NY Times gives Kofi Annan a soapbox and he presumes to lecture us on Sudan. He who steadfastly refused to call what is happening there genocide and has stood idly by while Sudan-supported militias have murdered thousands for the crime of not being Arab. The man apparently has no shame and the depths of his hypocrisy appear bottomless.

Captain Ed provides a much deserved rhetorical boot to Kofi’s ass:

Kofi Annan takes to the opinion pages of the New York Times today to preach accountability to Americans, a stunning and laughable assertion from the man who has led the United Nations to its nadir of credibility at least partially based on his own lack of accountability…

Annan makes it sound as if the civil war came as a result of a famine, and that the deaths could not have been prevented. He has it backwards. The famine came as a result of the war, and the failure of Annan himself in designating the Darfur atrocities as a genocide — which would have obligated him to act to stop it — contributed to hundreds of thousands of those deaths. For Annan to use those figures as a scold against the Western nations that had all but demanded Annan to acknowledge the Darfur genocide is akin to Marshal Petain standing on the grounds of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and demanding food aid to Jewish victims of a “famine”.

Hey, I’ll go Annan one better. Annan set up a famine-relief program for Iraqis called Oil-For-Food, into which went at least $64 billion dollars. Somewhere between $10B and $21B of that money disappeared into the pockets of the genocidal dictator it was meant to bypass, meaning that up to a third of the money never made it to the starving people it intended to feed and heal. Millions more of the money went into the pockets of UN personnel, such as his own right-hand man, Benon Sevan, and his own son, Kojo Annan. Kofi never bothered to ensure that the program, the largest aid program he ran, was properly audited.

The last person to lecture the US, the West, and the world on accountability should be Kofi Annan. Had he any shred of honor, he long ago would have resigned his post in the face of the collapse of his credibility on this point alone. The editorial board of the New York Times should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this abomination on its pages, and its tacit endorsement of Annan as global scold should cement its reputation as a clueless, inept, and outrageously biased media outlet which has no further credibility to speak on international affairs. There may be more disgusting examples of hypocrisy and shameless propaganda in media — the Times’ Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s Stalin apologias come to mind — but few reach this standard.

Well Kofi, get ready to meet Ambassador Bolton. There’s gonna be a new Sheriff in town, but frankly I think the UN may be broken beyond repair.

Well, I guess that ain’t exactly news, is it? You would think my capacity for outrage at the moral equivalence that is the foundation of the Left’s hypocrisy would be maxed out by now. But no, the Left finds new and astounding ways to boggle my brain with repulsive behavior in a fashion that appears limitless.

And as much as I despise all that is France, it appears that the Germans are looking to defeat them yet once again, this time in the battle of dubious thinking. Two salvos from the German left appear to be a powerful blitzkrieg like stroke of madness that other contenders on Left may find hard to best. As reported at Davids Medienkritik :

Few places symbolize the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the German left more clearly than Chechnya. When US President George W. Bush visited Germany last February, tens-of-thousands of angry demonstrators turned out in Mainz and all across Germany to vent their outrage at the Iraq war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Now, less than two months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Germany. And a whopping 30 protesters showed up to demonstrate the bloody Russian war and widespread human rights violations in Chechnya. Putin and Schroeder were all smiles as they tipped champagne glasses and signed multi-billion dollar business deals for everything from Russian natural gas imports to German bullet train exports in Schroeder’s hometown of Hannover. Naturally, with the cash registers busily ringing away, Chechnya never came up and the German media has all but ignored the topic…

…The entire charade clearly demonstrates how the so-called German “peace movement” has changed little since the days of the Cold War when thousands protested in outrage over US involvement in Vietnam, but gave the Russians a free pass during the brutal Soviet war of occupation in Afghanistan. The movement’s unending attempts to seize the moral high ground have been repeatedly undercut and exposed by the same sort of left-leaning Doppelmoral time and again…

Once again: Where are the hoards of angry anti-war protesters now that Vladimir Putin is in Germany? Why aren’t they out waving rainbow PACE flags, beating drums, burning Putin effigies and pounding the pavement in mass protest by the thousands? Where are the shrill cries of “no blood for oil?” Where are the concerned friends of oppressed Muslims with their Palestinian flags? Where is the outrage at the violation of the Geneva Conventions and international human rights? Where are the mock funeral processions and empty coffins? Where are the candle-light vigils and the portraits of the dead and missing? Why has the German left sold out in the interest of selling trains and securing the rights to import oil and gas?

Clearly: As long as this double standard in the handling of Iraq vs. Chechnya remains, the German left will continue to suffer a massive credibility gap. It is hard to lend any credibility to a movement that is so obviously biased and motivated by a one-sided hatred of America.

Hmm, and to think this is happening in that bastion of moral superiority, Europe. No wonder Michael Moore is so popular over there. As loathe as this ignorant hick is to critisize my betters, in this case those enlightened Germans (you know, the fun bunch that brought us two world wars and the holocaust), I feel compelled to share some of Davids other post exposing just how sick and jaded German thinking has become:

Hard to beat the idiocy of this wacko conspiracy theory: A top member of the German Green party – Antje Vollmer, the highest ranking woman in Germany’s parliament (and a real beauty by any definition) – accuses the U.S. government of an underhanded campaign against pedophile Catholic priests aimed at punishing the pope for his opposition to the Iraq war.

Poland’s participation in the Iraq war an attempt to weaken the Pope’s “hinterland”? An anti-pedophile campaign as a veiled attempt to attack the pope’s position against the Iraq war?

Oh, those evil neocons…never shy about hatching dark conspiracies. This probably means they are behind the Michael Jackson pedophile accusations as well…probably to discredit him for being such a macro-pacifist. This all just makes one wonder: How long will it be before the US government hauls in Michael Moore on child molestation charges and ships him of to Gitmo? Who will be the next victim of this vast conspiracy? Have the neo-cons no shame? If they are willing to take the pope down, they could be willing to take anyone down.

It gets worse, read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it.

Meanwhile, I’ll just step back real quietly. I wouldn’t want to provoke these lunatics too much. It’s best that they be left to rage against the awesome evil of BusHitler while we go on about our business of deposing tyrants.

Still, watching the wackiness of the Left is sorta like a visit to the zoo, isn’t it? The antics of the silly monkeys can be quite entertaining at times I suppose.

Via Vodka Pundit

Nothing makes me sicker than hypocrisy. Wait, there is one thing that makes me sicker. Hypocrisy that results in the death of innocents.

We are all painfully aware of the oil-for-food fiasco. UN bureaucrats enriching themselves by stealing money intended to buy food and medicine for the people of Iraq. And now we know that UN “peacekeepers” in the Congo have been using the impoverished children of that desperate land as their sexual playthings.

I have been a long time critic of the UN on many levels. It is a worthless institution. I could live with that I suppose, but its tendency to destroy that which it is sent to protect is unforgivable. The scope of the corruption and hypocrisy is made all too clear in this article from the Guardian. It was written by a former UN employee and pulls open the curtains on the evil in blue helmets.

Here’s a glimpse:

The children’s installation is introduced by the words: ‘They should still be with us.’ A nearby display asks whether they could be. It honours the actions of ordinary people of courage. People like Yahaya, a 60-year-old Muslim who saved Beatha, who narrates her story: ‘The killer was chasing me down an alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He [Yahaya] took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.’ Next to these tributes is another installation – a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians – many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.

Here, too, is Annan’s faxed response – ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

The museum’s silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan’s passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan’s future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.

His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.

Well, ok you say. Rwanda, that was bad. And yeah, the corruption in the oil-for-food deal is unacceptable. And the Congo, that was surely an aberration. So, three examples where the UN could have done better. Is that all you got?

I wish.

One very personal example: when I worked in Liberia in the mid-Nineties a new chief administrative officer was dispatched to Monrovia by the UN to replace the previous CAO, who was removed (then reassigned elsewhere) for taking a 15 per cent kickback on UN procurement contracts. In the name of cleaning up the old corruption, the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 per cent kickback on everything we purchased.

The worst part was watching him try to coerce as many of his young ‘local staff’ to sleep with him as possible. A UN salary is enough money to support an entire extended family in a country such as Liberia, so these vulnerable women were in a tortuously compromised position by their boss’s unwanted advances.

I was the human rights lawyer and these girls would come to my office in tears asking for help. I wrote memo after memo of complaint to my chain of command, but no one did anything. I even confronted the CAO personally. To no effect. When I visited the UN human resources office in New York to complain personally, they laughed at my naive outrage: ‘It happens all the time in the field,’ they said. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

In the meantime, a quarter of a million Liberians died, and warring factions committed war crimes. And the UN did – nothing. Just as it was simultaneously doing nothing, more infamously, in Rwanda and Bosnia.

So, I have to ask…where is the outrage? Who amongst us could not be outraged? Who would not be demanding Kofi’s resignation? Who will speak in favor of maintaining the status quo at the UN?

Oh, its our “peace loving” friends on the left. Who’d a thunk it?

The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation’s ideals. I am mystified by the reluctance of the left both in the US and the UK (the Guardian ‘s coverage, for example) to criticise Annan’s leadership. The bodies burn today in Darfur – and the women are raped – amid the sound of silence from Annan. How many genocides, the prevention of which is the UN’s very raison d’être, will we endure before the left is moved to criticise Annan? Shouldn’t we be hearing the left screaming bloody murder about the UN’s failure to protect vulnerable Africans? Has it lost its compass so badly that it purports to excuse the rape of Congolese women by UN peacekeepers under Annan’s watch? Is stealing money intended for widows and orphans in Iraq merely a forgivable bureaucratic snafu?

I am co-author of a book critical of Annan’s peacekeeping legacy, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone . My co-author, Dr Andrew Thomson, penned a line that drove the UN leadership to fire him. Lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims whom it had promised to protect in its ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica – where 8,000 men were slaughtered – Thomson wrote: ‘If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.’

Tell me again about liberal values. What exactly do these people stand for? Have they no shame? Is their hatred of America so great that they can not find time to criticize the evil that is personified in the UN?

Tell me later. Right now I need a bath.

Cross posted at The Wide Awakes