Glenn Reynolds on replacing Kofi Annan with former Czech President Vaclav Havel

Ironically, I picked this up today from Passion co-author Ingrid Jone's blog Sudan Watch:  Blogger Glenn Reynolds, who has been very faithful to Sudan and has used his high traffic site to good ends for the cause, had an excellent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It's subject is meaningful to many of us who have been part of the Passion extended family these long months--many of us have had our implicit faith in the UN shaken, and our trust in Kofi Annan shattered.  [Excerpt below the fold]

UPDATE: Havel for Secretary General bumper stickers are now available on the web (thanks also to Ingrid for the link)!

Time for a Kofi Break

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
November 29, 2004; Page A14

   

Things are going badly for Kofi Annan. The oil-for-food scandal has revealed U.N. behavior regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq that ranges from criminally inept to outright corrupt. Rape and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers haven't gotten the kind of attention they'd get if American troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll. And the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose -- the "never again" treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed after Cambodia and Rwanda -- is looking less and less credible in the wake of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur. And finally, the U.N. has so far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis.

Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan's resignation, amid talk of former Czech President Vaclav Havel as successor. ("Havel for Secretary General" bumper stickers are on the Web.) But however you assess Mr. Havel's chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan the comparison is devastating. Mr. Havel, after all, is a hero on behalf of freedom: A man who helped bring about the end of communist dominance in Eastern Europe, despite imprisonment and the threat of death -- a man who could write that "Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force." Mr. Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them.

If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it's even more damning to the U.N. Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, "So far, you . . . have chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances . . . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power." One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy. [more]