We're not supposed to notice the aromaKofi Annan is the perfect expression of the United Nations: soft, suave, urbane, and a magnet for incompetence and corruption.
The apologists for the U.N. are fond of saying that if the U.N. didn't exist we would have to invent it. Just what this means is not meant to be clear. If Kofi Annan didn't exist someone would have to invent him, too.
Mr. Annan, in fact, was invented, and by the very Americans the apologists loathe, when the stink of the Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali administration finally became so overpowering that nearly everyone agreed that he had to go. His replacement had to satisfy the requirements of the Lilliputians of the Third World who are forever fantasizing about how to tie down Gulliver, and the Americans scrounged through what was available and came up with Mr. Annan, fresh from mismanaging the U.N. "peacekeeping" operations in Rwanda and Bosnia. Wherever Mr. Annan went, massacres followed. But he apologized nicely and that was that. The man and the hour had met.
And he didn't break his sting of failure, incompetence, and mendacity.
The usual suspects are closing ranks behind Mr. Annan. The 191 ambassadors to the U.N., terrified at the thought that any Lilliputian should be deprived of his sweet life in America on someone else's dime, gave Mr. Annan a standing ovation this week when he presented his "blueprint for U.N. reform" to the General Assembly. There was no appreciation of the irony of the moment, with the presentation of institutional reform by the man who may be in desperate need of personal reform himself.
