The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan

[complain jane]

<snip>

Last June UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said of the media coverage of the so-called Oil for Food Scandal, "It's a bit like lynching, actually." By December the vigilantes were lining up, swinging their ropes. The neoconservative and paleoconservative assault on him and the UN has been like a slightly slower version of the Swift Boat veterans' campaign against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry --right down to the halfhearted and belated disavowals by George W. Bush.

<snip>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20041222/cm_thenation/20050110williams

[Jason Bradfield]

1. of course...

The right is motivated in part by the fact that Anan is black and has a funny name. that really motivates a lot of red-state right-wingers although they won't admit.

[LWolf]

2. A long, informative article

with a dead-on-target conclusion; the bolding is mine:

Former Gore 2000 campaign head Donna Brazile, who says she is reconsidering her affiliation with the FDD, denounced the calls for Annan's resignation before the investigation is finished. "I worked on Capitol Hill before Kofi Annan, and the UN has always been a dirty word there," Brazile noted. "It just goes back to the neocons and their entire approach to multilateral institutions and their role in the world. They've got the airwaves to themselves. I just hope the Democrats stand up against them on this issue."

If the Democrats want to do that, they should begin by distancing themselves from the Democratic Leadership Council's shameful call for Annan's resignation and join those who signed Representative Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites)'s letter deploring the attacks. And they should join Representative Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record) in demanding that the Governmental Reform Committee investigate the real oil-for-food scandal: what happened to the more than $8 billion unspent from the oil-for-food program that the United States insisted be handed over to the "Iraq Development Fund," overseen by US occupation authority head Paul Bremer. The rest of the Security Council reluctantly agreed to this payment, but only on condition that the fund be monitored by international auditors. The auditors were never allowed to do their work, and it is now suspected that most of that money went to Halliburton on no-bid contracts. Now there are grounds for some resignations. But you know who won't be calling for them.

[Martin Eden]

3. Definitely a diversionary tactic

The right wants Oil-for-Food to be the REAL scandal associated with Iraq, and for the UN to be viewed as the corrupt bad guys while America in its white hat battles evil and brings freedom and democracy to Iraqis who continued to be oppressed as Saddam collected kickbacks.

Nevermind that the verdict is not yet in as to who is most culpable or what impact the corruption really had on the situation in Iraq. Forget about the lies and the carnage and and the irreparable damage done by an invasion that violated international law and the UN Charter -- the UN is the problem!!!

The UN is bad; therefore the invaders are righteous.

[CHIMO]

4. Who's behind oil-for-food scandal?

Once it became clear some months ago that Saddam Hussein had been telling the truth about not having weapons of mass destruction or connections to al-Qaida, it should have been an embarrassment to the neo-conservatives who talked President George Bush into war with Iraq.

France, Germany, Russia and China had become obstacles to regime change in Baghdad, either at the UN Security Council or at Nato, or both.

It has now also been shown that Iraq had met the conditions of the UN Security Council post-Gulf war resolution which demanded he destroy his unconventional weapons before economic sanctions could be lifted and the Iraqi government could resume the sale of oil.

My educated guess is that the neo-cons who continue to have serious influence on the Bush administration through Vice-President Dick Cheney's office, knew full well that if the Volcker commission did its job honestly, it would be able to report that the oil-for-food programme worked pretty much as it was designed to work.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/561BE24F-B06B-4CC1-B28A-F6845EA8E469.htm