UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s valedictory speech on the Middle East is worth careful study. Here is a man who knows much about the backroom maneuvers in New York and Washington before the Iraq invasion. Here is a man who tried to use his quiet style of diplomacy in order to avoid disaster. And here is a man who has been proven almost completely right. Yet even in his final official word on the matter, Annan did not berate the Bush administration for its refusal to listen to wise advice. Indeed he did not mention the president’s name at all. Instead, he set out a sober and dispassionate assessment of the region. He reaffirmed his long-held belief, now echoed by the Iraq Study Group Report, that a just settlement for the Palestinians is both essential and crucial to wider peace.
A UN secretary-general who has been so marginalized and ignored as Annan would have been justified in launching a spirited assault on the White House. But Annan allowed no note of rancor to creep into his speech. In stark contrast, Republican neocons immediately launched a vituperative personal attack on Annan himself. The basis for this was that the secretary-general had failed to clean up the corruption and inefficiency at the UN. This is an acknowledged shortcoming of the Annan decade at the UN, one acknowledged to some degree by Annan himself. But how Annan’s administrative failures could reasonably impact upon his judgment of the tensions and politics in the Middle East is something of a mystery. The response from the Bush camp was therefore both petty and utterly irrelevant.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compounded the administration’s folly by saying that Annan had missed the opportunity to highlight the positive role that the United States has played in the region and in the war on terror. Just what, an informed person might ask, did Rice expect Annan to say? That after six years of the Bush administration, the Palestinians are happy to be imprisoned and bombarded within their own country by the Israelis? That as a result of US-backed Israeli aggression against Lebanon, Hezbollah has not been strengthened and does not threaten to plunge the country back into civil war? That the Iraqi government is entirely content that the only function it can truly carry out has to do with ministerial stationery within the Green Zone? That as a result of the Afghan and Iraqi invasions, the back of international terror has been broken and the world is a safer place?
The truth of course is that this US administration has perpetrated a catastrophic series of miscalculations in the Middle East which have left the world a vastly less safe place than it was immediately following 9/11. An ignorant and stubborn White House ignored all warnings, including those from the UN secretary-general who had unique access to all the players and therefore considerable insights. It is a testament to the stature of Annan that, diplomatic to the end, he revealed none of the inside knowledge he undoubtedly possesses. Nevertheless, political and moral pigmies still tried to savage his heels.
