Michael Steinberger

Your article in The Nation makes an irrefutable case that some on the right are using the oil-for-food scandal to try to destroy U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and are undeterred by the lack of concrete evidence against him. This is the way conservatives operate; they create their own reality, and, if the facts don't quite fit, they don't much care. But what I found most interesting about the article was your non-defense of Annan; in a 2,500-word article decrying the assault on the secretary-general, you offer not one word in praise of him. But then, there isn't much to praise about Annan; he has been a truly horrible secretary-general; as both a matter of principle and smart politics, we liberals should be the ones demanding his resignation.

I'll get to the politics tomorrow; today, the principled reason for wanting Annan gone.

The oil-for-scandal imbroglio is but one in a series of scandals and debacles that have befallen the United Nations during Annan's tenure. At this point, there is nothing William Safire, Claudia Rossett, or the gasbags at FOX News Channel can say that will do more to discredit the organization than will Annan's continued presence on the 38th floor. Knowing what we now know of his conduct during the Rwanda catastrophe -- criminally negligent would be an apt description -- it is clear Annan should never have been elected to the top job, and the same lethal combination of ineptitude and arrogance he displayed then has characterized his eight years as secretary-general.

Consider what we've seen in just the last few months:

• The oil-for-food scandal: The release of the audits last week prove that, at the very least, the oil-for-food program was mismanaged on an epic scale. You no doubt saw the remarkable interview with Mark Malloch Brown in last week's Financial Times; his remarks firmly put to rest the notion that this is a phantom scandal cooked up by right-wing ideologues, and he clearly indicates that the most damning revelations are yet to come.

• Genocide in Darfur: Yet another genocide takes place on Annan's watch, and, once again, he is slow to react and dismayingly equivocal when he finally does chime in.

• Sexual abuse in Congo: We learned in December that there have been 150 cases of sexual abuse involving U.N. peacekeepers in Congo; most of the victims were teenage girls. A local rebel leader was quoted in The Times of London as telling one U.N. official that the peacekeepers would be remembered in Congo for "running after little girls."

• Whitewashing within the Secretariat: Two senior aides to Annan were accused of sexual harassment (one was also accused of favoritism); in both instances, Annan short-circuited the investigative process and simply exonerated the two men, nearly prompting a mutiny among U.N. staff.

What exactly are we -- liberals -- circling the wagons to defend here? Defending Annan is not the same thing as defending the United Nations; indeed, to defend Annan at this point is to defend someone whose mismanagement has done grievous harm to the United Nations and to the cause of liberal internationalism. Obviously, the United Nations is a sprawling organization employing tens of thousands of people, but Annan has proven beyond any doubt that he is incapable of providing the competent, accountable leadership the United Nations so badly needs. Its credibility has never been lower; although Annan has only two years left in his term, for the good of the United Nations, he must be given his gold watch now.

Ian Williams

The reasons you produce aren't valid in themselves. Over Darfur, Kofi Annan has been far stronger than his predecessor was about Bosnia or, indeed, Rwanda -- to which, of course, Annan was not unconnected himself. Annan has gone way beyond normal diplomatic protocol in chiding Khartoum and calling for international action. The U.N. reports have been unequivocal in their condemnation of Sudanese government behavior. But in the end, it was the United States that blinked and went to Khartoum with carrots rather than sticks. Just as in Rwanda, if the big powers persist in speaking very loudly while carrying a very small and light stick, it is not the U.N.'s fault -- though it’s always been used as a scapegoat.

Indeed, Annan had been working hard on talking the rhetoric of "never again" and implementing structures for genuine humanitarian intervention before that became Tony Blair’s and George W. Bush's retrospective excuse. The campaign against Annan has derailed that further.

On the oil-for-food issue, I rather suspect that Mark Malloch Brown, a canny operator, is trying to throw something to the wolves. The audit reports are pettifogging accountants' quibbles about mismanagement that come nowhere near the scale of the alleged "Greatest Financial Scandal in the History of the Universe" -- and, incidentally, the managers' rebuttals and answers were not made public.

It does call into question Annan's judgment in naming Paul Volcker, who seems to be all too sensitive to the conservative echo chamber and not totally aware of how things are done, to head the independent inquiry. When he said that there was a strong supposition of "monkey business" on the part of the former head of the oil-for-food program, perhaps he should have mentioned that his inquiry had not even got round to interviewing the accused.

Whatever his final report says, no matter how many orders of magnitude less than the FOX-pack claimed, the United Nations and the oil-for-food program will be deemed guilty by those who started the campaign.

The irony of all this is that Kofi Annan was the American choice. Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton threw Boutros Boutros-Ghali to exactly the same set of wolves in order to make way for Annan.

A further irony is that one of the reasons for their attacks on Annan is his success in walking the diplomatic tightrope strung between insufferable American behavior and the U.N.'s genuine need to engage with Washington and to maintain a prestigious profile with the American public. All U.N. secretaries-general have had to pander to the great powers. Annan was left with only one to pander to.

Annan deserves our support against the hounds of FOX, because their attacks are irrational in their form -- and profoundly reactionary in their substance. They are not attacking Annan; they are attacking any form of multilateralism, whether the Land Mine Treaty, non-proliferation, the International Criminal Court, or even the Geneva Conventions (all of which he has publicly supported). They were not even attacking the oil-for-food program; they were attacking an organization that dared to say no -- or, at least, refused to say yes -- to Bush's war on Iraq.

Michael Steinberger

I'm not sure even Kofi Annan would go the lengths you go to exculpate him.

You write that Annan was "not unconnected" to the Rwanda debacle. Not unconnected? He was the head of U.N. peacekeeping at the time; and we know -- thanks to Philip Gourevitch (surely he isn't part of the vast right-wing conspiracy?) -- that Annan received a fax from Romeo Dallaire on January 11, 1994, warning of an imminent slaughter and that he ordered Dallaire not to intervene. Not unconnected? He doesn't have blood on his hands, but he surely ought to have it on his conscience. And if he'd had any sense of shame or honor, he would have resigned at the time.

For all your loathing of President George W. Bush, your defense of Annan is remarkably, well, Bushian. To hear the president, his aides, and his supporters tell it, nothing that goes wrong on Bush's watch is ever Bush's responsibility; you are making almost the exact same argument on Annan's behalf. Indeed, your suggestion -- that Annan's only mistake in the oil-for-food affair was to have appointed Paul Volcker -- immediately called to mind Bush's suggestion that his only mistake was to have made a few bad Cabinet appointments.

The only issue I raised that you address with any degree of seriousness and substance is Darfur; but here, too, the Kofi Annan you describe is not the Kofi Annan the rest of the world has observed. Even after Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s own man on the scene, had sounded the alarm about ethnic cleansing, Annan refused to use the word "genocide" to describe the events in Darfur. Nor could he have been any more lackadaisical about traveling to the region to assess the situation for himself.

On the oil-for-food scandal, you resort to what lawyers dealt an impossibly weak hand do: You obfuscate. You disparagingly describe Mark Malloch Brown, an Annan appointee, as a "canny operator" and accuse him of trying to appease the U.N.’s critics; you level the same charge against Volcker, also an Annan appointee. You try to play down the scandal by mockingly invoking attempts to play it up and by dismissing the audits as the work of "pettifogging accountants." Finally, you throw your hands in the air and declare that none of this matters, because the fix is in and Annan's guilt has been predetermined.

Only at the end do we get to what I think is your real motive in defending Annan: You seem to believe that, in defending Annan, you are defending multilateralism. For many Americans liberals, and for many Europeans of all political stripes, multilateralism has become something of a secular faith in which the United Nations is the Vatican and the secretary-general the pope. (Dominique de Villepin, in his speech to the U.N. Security Council on February 14, 2002, even referred to the United Nations as "this temple.") Just as many Catholics see an attack on the pope as an attack on their faith, many devout multilateralists seem to regard an attack on the secretary-general as an attack on theirs; I gather you fall into this category.

I do not. I certainly prefer multilateralism to unilateralism, and I prefer collective action under the auspices of the United Nations to ad hoc coalitions of the willing (or coerced). However, collective action is not an end in itself; if the United Nations can't summon the will to try to prevent even the most egregious human rights violations, I'd rather bypass Turtle Bay than see tens of thousands of lives sacrificed on the altar of multilateralism. And let me repeat what I said before: Supporting Annan is not the same thing as supporting the United Nations. Annan has done great harm to the institution and to the cause of liberal internationalism, and the United Nations can ill afford to wait two years for the fresh start it so badly needs.

I certainly understand your desire not to yield to the yahoos on the right, but I think you are misreading what's going on here. Bush has no desire to get rid of Annan; Annan is actually quite useful to the administration. In the minds of many Americans now, Annan is the corrupt, incompetent face of a corrupt, incompetent institution, and this is precisely how the Bushies want the United Nations to be seen.

It seems to me that the smart approach would be to call Bush's bluff. The president has repeatedly said that he supports the United Nations and wishes to work with it. Clearly, though, the administration doesn't want to work with Annan, and the secretary-general is obviously in no position at this point to wield any influence in Washington. If Annan quit or was forced to resign, the United States would have a great deal of say over the choice of a replacement, and I believe Bush would find it much harder to stiff the United Nations if it were his man or woman at the helm of the organization.

Annan -- haughty, inept, and now completely engulfed in scandal -- is a godsend for those in Washington who despise the United Nations and what it symbolizes; for this very reason, I want him gone.

Ian Williams

It really will not do to pick up every attack from the talk shows and throw it Annan. The secretary-general is not a head of state, nor even the CEO of an organization. He "represents" 191 member states and is there to do their bidding. Of course, he has some moral authority -- and Annan has used it – but, in general, he cannot frontally attack a member state, because he has to work with it afterward. Indeed, Annan has no troops of his own; he first must persuade the U.N. Security Council to authorize a mission and then persuade member states to contribute troops.

Let us begin with Darfur. Annan actually went to Sudan and protested to the government there. He has addressed Khartoum in terms that are unprecedented for a secretary-general talking to a member government.

At the request of the U.N. security council, and with no reluctance at all, Annan sent a commission to Sudan to investigate whether or not genocide took place. Annan, with the Europeans and Africans, actually managed to get some U.N. troops on the ground and was pushing for more; the United States did not offer any. We can only guess whether that was out of prejudice against having American troops in blue helmets or a rare case of awareness that sending troops into yet another Arab state would terminally finish Washington's already moribund reputation in the Muslim world.

In fact, Annan has been pushing, almost from the time he took office, for the international community to adopt rules that would allow action against states who massacre their own people -- but without falling prey to opportunistic abuse of the concept of humanitarian intervention of the kind that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bush used in Iraq. The Annan-commissioned High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change has just reported back with a set of principles that, if adopted, could genuinely mean never again for Rwanda and Bosnia.

Annan was indeed deeply implicated in those events -- as was the rest of the world. But they happened before he took office, so asking him to resign over them now is somewhat anomalous. Unlike others, he actually took the blame in the reports he ordered after he had taken office.

I note that, after you accepted that the oil-for-food "scandal" was largely contrived by the right, you returned to the fray with it. I repeat: There may have been a scandal -- but it was not a U.N. scandal. Saddam Hussein got most of his revenue from selling oil to Jordan and Turkey with the explicit approval of the U.S. administration.

Annan is respected by the vast majority of the world, and that is because he has been cautious but principled in his approach to global issues. He has not been heroic in his virtue, and he has avoided provocation. It would be nice if he were louder -- but that is not in his job description. As the arch-diplomat, he has to talk to people whom he may dislike.

The only people who have called for his resignation (presumably, with the honorable exception of yourself) are a small but vociferous coterie in the United States, not one of whom has ever had a good word to say for the organization or for multilateralism. In effect, for Annan to go at their behest would be to hand over the choice of his successor to this same crowd whose sole aim is to see a United Nations totally subservient to fervent neoconservative dreams of empire -- or destroyed.

Michael Steinberger

I did not say Annan should resign now because of his failure to act in Rwanda; I said that if he'd had any sense of shame or honor, he would have resigned then.

Nor did I say that the oil-for-food imbroglio has been "largely contrived" by FOX and friends. I merely acknowledged that some on the right are using the scandal to try to destroy Annan and to discredit the United Nations and that they have reached conclusions that are not supported by the evidence that has come to light thus far. But their cynical agenda is not an excuse to ignore the fact that something went terribly wrong with the oil-for-food program, a point you've now finally conceded. You write, "I repeat: There may have been a scandal." No, Ian, you aren’t repeating yourself: This is the first time in our entire exchange that you've acknowledged that the scandal is not the product of William Safire's imagination, febrile though it may be.

You offer two reasons -- excuses, really -- for why Annan should be absolved of responsibility for what has befallen the United Nations on his watch, and neither is satisfactory. The first reason is institutional paralysis: The United Nations is only as effective as its members make it; because members seem unable or unwilling to reach consensus on the most vexing issues confronting the world community, Annan and the United Nations are hamstrung. It is certainly true that if the United States and other nations aren't prepared to set aside their differences in order to act on behalf of the greater good, there is only so much the United Nations can do.

But how does this explain the lack of transparency and accountability in the Secretariat? How does it explain the gross mismanagement of the oil-for-food program? How does it explain the lack of oversight of U.N. peacekeeping operations in Congo? It doesn't, of course. Nor does it explain Annan's slow and equivocal response to the crisis in Darfur. (We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.) You acknowledge that the job comes with some built-in moral authority, yet you portray Annan as a mere figurehead who must tread cautiously so as to not offend his 191 constituents.

However, Annan didn’t hesitate to anger Washington and London by declaring the Iraq War illegal; he routinely angers the Israelis by denouncing their actions in the occupied territories. So why the unwillingness to step on loafers over Darfur? If Annan is so respected around the world, then surely he ought to be able to rally the world's conscience and string together the votes necessary to sanction U.N. intervention in Sudan. Instead, the most impassioned statement yet delivered at the UN concerning Darfur has come not from Annan but from outgoing U.S. Ambassador John Danforth. As you listened to Danforth's lament that "one wonders about the utility of the General Assembly on days like this," did you not yourself wonder why these words couldn't come from the mouth of the secretary-general instead?

The other reason you wish to exonerate Annan is because you see the assault on him as part of a larger offensive -- against the United Nations and multilateralism -- and are determined not to yield an inch to the neocons and theocons. So you put yourself in the position of defending the indefensible (Annan), because the indefensible happens to be under assault from the reprehensible (the right-wing noise machine). But I'd like to think that one of the things that distinguishes Us from Them is a willingness to be guided by facts, and the fact is that Annan, through his ineptitude, has brought these troubles on himself. He is clearly not up to the job, and the United Nations has suffered grievously as a result. For its sake, and for the sake of multilateralism, Annan needs to go.

Ian Williams

I have always said there was an oil-for-food scandal -- but it is not a United Nations scandal. The program fed 80 percent of the Iraqi people and kept Baghdad short enough of resources that we now know it succeeded in its second aim: preventing Saddam Hussein from rearming. As scandals go, we can only wish they would all be so successful.

On the other hand, Saddam Hussein's sanctions-busting was known and openly condoned by the United States; Congress exonerated Turkey and Jordan from any sanctions. Samir Vincent, who pled guilty last week, was an American citizen acting under the noses of the CIA and FBI. He was not a U.N. employee. Look again at the stories in the Financial Times and elsewhere about the investigation. You will notice that they are not blaming the United Nations or Annan; they are looking at the real scandal.

Is Annan perfect? No. In my opinion, he concedes too much to Ariel Sharon and kowtows too much to Beijing, and there are indeed many people in the United Nations whom he should have fired long ago. Under pressure, he has probably given the United States more in the way of influence than I would like.

But overall, he has combined principle and diplomatic effectiveness in a way that has made him an outstanding secretary-general in seriously trying times. Previous incumbents could play one side against the other; he has to wrestle with one dubiously rational superpower that other nations are usually too scared to stand against.

It is precisely because so many people around the world, and even in the United States, see him as a moral authority that the diehards on the right have been slinging mud.

And then we come to what really has to be game, set, and match. You almost criticize Kofi Annan for telling off the United States and the United Kingdom (for illegally invading another country) and for reprimanding Ariel Sharon (for his behavior in the occupied territories). Most of the world applauds him for doing that. Doesn’t defying two veto-holding powers, and still managing to talk to them constructively, speak to a judicious combination of diplomacy and moral principle?

But you contrast it with his silence on Darfur. Go hit your Google button, since you don't accept what I said in the previous post. Just take a random selection of the hits. In June, Annan said: "The world must insist that the Sudanese authorities neutralize and disarm the Janjaweed militia, who continue to terrorize the population."

In September, he said: "The tragedy in Darfur is one of the greatest challenges the international community faces today. The whole world is watching this tragedy unfold, and it is watching us. No one can be allowed to sidestep or ignore their responsibility to protect the innocent civilians." And again: "Our urgent task is to do everything we can to help protect the people of Darfur from further humanitarian suffering, terrible violence, and human rights abuses, and to bring their agony to an end." And: "No matter how the crimes that are being committed against civilians in Darfur are characterized or legally defined, it is urgent to take action now. Civilians are still being attacked and fleeing their villages even as we speak, many months after the government committed itself to bring the militias under control."

The fact that the American. press was not listening, distracted perhaps by the inane buzzing about the oil-for-food program, should not detract from Annan's careful attention. Having watched the war in Bosnia, where the United Nations covered up actively for atrocities, I can assure you that the U.N. monitors have quickly reported on the actions of the Sudanese, and he has condemned them in an unprecedented way.

There are legitimate criticisms of Annan, from a leftward perspective. But you have not made any of them -- and the criticisms from FOX and its allies, above all, shouldn't be recycled with a liberal label.