The Good News and the Bad News

Good News: Kofi Annan gives his final speech as UN Secretary General (woohoo!). In a time when the free world is threatened by Islamofascists and totalitarians with nukes, what did Annan decide to focus on?

Kofi Annan, nearing the end of his tenure as U.N. secretary-general, urged the United States on Monday to shun go-it-alone diplomacy and human rights abuses committed in the name of its "war on terror."
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"More than ever today Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world's peoples can face global challenges together," Annan said. "And in order to function, the system still cries out for far-sighted American leadership, in the Truman tradition."

It gets better:

"It is only through multilateral institutions that states can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organize those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong," he said.

Kofi Annan preaching about accountability. Thoughts come to mind: Oil for Food, peacekeeper rape, prostitution and paedophilia scandals in Congo and Haiti, the anti-Israel Human Rights Commission being superceded by the even more anti-Israel Human Rights Council. Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia. More sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Kojo Annan and Cotecna. Congo, Somalia ... fingers starting to ache listing these out ...

The irony in the second sentence knows no bound. The UN is more about enabling voting blocs of undemocratic tyrannies than it is about fairness and democracy. One democracy one vote, one tyrant one vote. By giving the poor and weak influence over rich and strong at the international level, the UN has enabled rich and strong tyrants at the intranational level to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing on the poor and weak.

But now the Bad News.

From the same Reuters article:

Annan steps down at the end of the month, to be succeeded by Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea.

Looks like the UN isn't shutting down with the departure of Annan, then.