UN's Decline And Fall...

[Violet_Crumble]

By Alexander Cockburn


counterpunch
02 Septemeber, 2003

"One has to be careful," said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late August, "not to confuse the UN with the US." If the Secretary General had taken his own advice, then maybe his Brazilian subordinate, Sergio Vieira de Mello, might not have been so summarily blown to pieces in Baghdad two days earlier. As things are, the UN still craves the handmaid role the US desperately needs in Iraq as political cover.

Whichever group sent that truck bomb on its way decided that Vieira and his boss were so brazen in moving the UN to play a fig-leaf role in the US occupation of Iraq that spectacular action was necessary to draw attention to the process the process. So the UN man handpicked by the White House paid with his life.

To get a sense of how swift has been the conversion of the UN into after-sales service provider for the world's prime power, just go back to 1996, when the United States finally decided that Annan's predecessor as UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had to go.

In a pleasing foreshadowing of Annan's plaintive remark cited above, Boutros-Ghali told Clinton's top foreign policy executives, "Please allow me from time to time to differ publicly from US policy." But unlike Annan he did so, harshly contrasting western concern for Bosnia, whose conflict he described as "a war of the rich" with its indifference to the genocide in Rwanda and to horrifying conditions throughout the third world. Then, in April 1996,he went altogether too far, when he insisted on publication of the findings of the UN inquiry which implicated Israel in the killing of some hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a United Nations camp in Kanaa in south Lebanon.


http://www.countercurrents.org/us-cockburn020903.htm