United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his swan song today at the Truman Presidential Library in Missouri. It was a thinly veiled parting shot at U.S. foreign policy delivered by an embittered U.N. leader seething with self-righteous indignation and resentment. Annan's Missouri speech will go down in history as one of the most blatant assaults on a U.S. administration by a serving U.N. official.
In his condescending remarks, Annan warned, with Washington clearly in his sights, that "no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others." In reference to the U.S.-led war on terror, Annan stated that America's position in the "vanguard of the global human rights movement…can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends are naturally troubled and confused." In a clear jab at the Iraq war, he warned that "no state can make its own actions legitimate in the eyes of others. When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose—for broadly shared aims—in accordance with broadly accepted norms."
Annan's speech followed his recent interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, in which he suggested that Iraqis were worse off today than they were under Saddam Hussein. The interview sparked outrage in Baghdad, and Annan's comments were condemned by Iraq's National Security Adviser Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie, who pointedly asked, "Doesn't Kofi Annan differentiate between the mass killing of Iraqis by the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein and the present indiscriminate killings of civilians, Iraqi civilians, by the al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq?"
