A business executive now says he never lobbied United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan about the U.N. oil-for-food contract, even though his “smoking gun” e-mail released this week said that “we had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage.” What Michael Wilson conveniently didn’t say is whether anyone else at his company, including Annan’s son, spoke to the secretary-general about the corrupt contract.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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10 Comments
Kofi’s term will be up next year sometime. This oil-for-food contract scandel will not be over till then. But we will see. It is an interesting development and to see it all play out with all the players involved around the world.
I hear that Bill Clinton is slated to be the next SG of the UN after Kofi!
Dream on. The UN SG spot is reserved for banana republic despots, friends of France, and bloviating leftist intellectualizers.
Americans need not apply, especially since the European elite actually considers American liberals to be right wingers.
Besides, the UN has its decades-long record of documented graft, corruption, tyranny, rape, and cowardice to uphold. Bill Clinton might be brazen enough to pull it off, but even he would think twice before throwing in with that mob.
Anyway, Hillary would never stand for it.
Right! We even had a former Nazi officer as SG one time. Can anyone name him? But seriously, about the tyranny, rape, cowardice, graft, corruption, etc., arent America as a nation guilty of them as well? The wonderful thing about America is the freedom of the press combined with moral populace, so those abuses do not tend to fester long. Sadly, abundance of money have lured many to abandon virtues for easy lives in which personal riches is the goal, and not the welfare of the society as a whole.
PS: I thank the French for defeating the British and allowing fledgling nation of America to be born! Vive le France!
Roo,
No, I am not aware of which former officer of the National Socialist German Workers’(NAZI) Party was a UN SG. And emphatically, No! America as a nation is not guilty of tyranny, rape, cowardice, graft, or corrupton. A few Americans, as individuals, might do these things; but it is not our national chracter, nor that of our leadership, to systematically act in these ways for entire generations. Quite the opposite, and it would be obvious except for the steady drumbeat of America haters, abetted by the credulous media that give more than equal time to every crackpot exaggeration of misconduct by a few Americans.
It is chronic third world graft and corruption, sometimes with the help of the UN, that prevents poor nations from providing the legal, financial and physical infrastructure to foster prosperity. Foreign aid is less the answer than stopping the corruption in those nations. It is corruption in Mexico, for example, that keeps poor Mexicans pouring over our borders. It was UN corruption that allowed Saddam to collude with France and other nations to starve Iraqi children while stealing the oil that was supposed to feed them.
As for cowardice and rape, when we send in our troops, we (unlike the UN “peacekeepers”) have disciplined troops who tend to their duties, rather than establish prostitution and rape rings so common with UN deployments.
Our troops also stand their ground and don’t run away at the first sign of conflict. We aren’t that kind of coward. But, in a larger sense, cowardice canm be defined as failing to do the right thing, the difficult thing, the unpopular thing; and you have me there. We failed to do the right thing when liberals reneged on America’s promise to South Vietnam to continue to support them after we pulled out our troops. The resulting Communist slaughter cost millions of lives. We failed to do the right thing for decades as terrorists festered and despots murdered their people in the Middle East. And we continue to let despots kill in Africa, Cuba, and China, to name just a few. No one in the world is safe from terror as long as despots are allowed to rule. We ignore this basic truth at our peril.
How can you seriously apply the word “tyranny” to America? Tyranny is what is happening to the people of Cuba, Africa, Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, and everywhere else that despots rule. By contrast, here in America liberals get all tangled up in their underwear arguing about the non-issue of how easily the FBI can take a peek at what terrorists are reading.
Ireland,
I bury my heart at Wounded Knee. (Hope you get the reference.) Shall we also add many other in the history of American Imperialism where natives are subjugated, i.e., the Hawaiians. There are many documented evidences of power abuses within the US military. Some may even persist to today, just look at Colorado Springs Academy’s attempt to correct for past complaints.
To answer for the tyranny questions, who may I ask, had been revealed to stand behind many oppressive regimes, such as Shah Pahlevi in Iran, military rulers in South Korea, the Saudi royal family, and gasp, Saddam Hussein himself? If those foreign names mean nothing, how about slavery and the subsequent segregation? If that’s not tyranny, I don’t know what is. Those stains in history shape our country as a whole, spurring her to strive for what’s just and right. By claiming America as sinless of tyranny, you have just allow the Nazi to claim innocence on the Holocaust. Or are we going to wait to admit our dark past until Japan apologizes specifically for Rape of Nanking? Tyranny is everywhere, even in the corporate boardrooms. Rampant Capitalism for one is another form of tyranny. Rules are established to ensure fair trade. Thus, it is the duty of every American to be vigilant to stem the growth of tyranny in all its form.
I strongly beg you to expand your horizon, and not just spouting one-sided anti-liberal propaganda. I hail from a traditionally Republican family, but I take the pains of also listening to the other side. Call it cowardice, if you must. But they’re my neighbours, and the Lord commands me to love them and care for them as well.
PS: Kurt Waldheim was also elected president of Austria, and had been barred to enter the US.
The “oil for food scandal” is a trumped up contrivance to discredit the U.N., the only real rival to American world domination.
If the right wing really were concerned about corrupt dealings with Saddam Hussein, they would look at how Halliburton under then CEO Dick Cheney made millions of dollars from illegal trades at the same time as the “oil for food” scandal was supposedly playing out.
The idea that Saddam was cutting deals with everyone but huge Bush-backing American multinationals does not even make good nonsense, but that’s what the right-wing wants us to believe.
The simple fact is this–the U.N. was right about asking the U.S. to wait to invade Iraq until WMD’s were found. Since no WMD’s were found or will be found, any reasonable person realizes that the whole pretext for this war was false.
Instead of dealing with their horrible mistake, the right-wing attempts to discredit the authority of the U.N.
Typical . . .
Roo,
I was thinking of more recent US history. Granted, during the 19th century, the US treated natives like most other nations did. Not much to be proud of there, but why keep dredging up things from a century and more ago? Also, the slavery issue has long been put to rest and segregation issues are mostly down to issues on the opposite end of segregation — Affirmative Action. Military abuses are far less today than in past conflicts, due to having a professional army with better training. Sure, there are occasional lapses today, but claiming a system-wide problem of military abuse is a slap in the face to all our men and women in uniform, when only a few deserve to be singled out.
As for the US supporting tyrannical regimes, that was part of the US version of Realpolitik, which was practiced by most countries and by all administrations of this country during the cold war; the idea being that if sovereignty was to mean anything, then in practical terms, we had to deal with the despots as well as the good leaders. Granted it made for strange bedfellows. By the way, the term “Realpolitik” gets used too many ways to be an entirely specific term. I mean it in the sense used here – politics based on practical rather than moral or ideological concerns.
So now Bush has taken a different course and the CIA and State Department have been fighting him all the way. They want to continue Realpolitik, and to keep us schmoozing with the world’s tyrants in order to maintain an uneasy veneer of peace in the world, even though local conflicts have cost millions of lives over the years and terrorism has festered and grown.
Bush decided to end Realpolitik as much as possible. As a result, his critics are all choked up about how nobody loves us anymore. Well, it doesn’t appear that we can have it both ways. Nevertheless, the current administration is trying harder than any administration before it to be on the right side of this point, working to pressure tyrannical regimes instead of just propping them up.
Spare me the “Argumentum ad Nazium.” The tired analogy of everything to Hitler has long been stretched beyond the breaking point, and your use of it is entirely gratuitous.
In any case, you can put our “dark past” up against any other country’s and find us needing a lot fewer apologies, not that apologies mean anything. I’m not going to argue from the standpoint of our slightly “dark past,” because it isn’t the America of today; and I think that dwelling on it or using at as a starting point for any discussions about America fails to recognize how much progress we have made in the last century.
Again, the real tyranny today is what is happening to the people of Cuba, Africa, Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, and everywhere else that totalitarian despots rule.
Stretching tyranny to the corporate boardrooms was a nice touch. I’ve worked with top executives of some of the nation’s largest corporations. Without going into details, I’ll just say that I liked many of them and found most of them to be hard-working and honest people. Too much money and power are a terrible drain to the human spirit, though; and a few fell prey to the temptations of greed and mastery. They were pure hell to be around. They were mini-tyrants, in a pointy-haired-boss kind of way; and I simply refused to work for them.
Still, it is hard to agree entirely with your comment that “tyranny is everywhere, even in the corporate boardrooms.” That’s just too broad a brush to use. I met some neat people and a very few world class jerks, but never felt actually tyrannized by any of them, let alone a corporation. Nor did I ever see a case where corporate policies were intended to tyrannize. Granted, it happens, sometimes by accident and sometimes not; so corporations sometimes need to be reigned in, and that’s why new laws are written every time a new corporate scam is uncovered.
Anyway, I have a question for you. It’s a serious one. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that America is or has been a tyrannical state, as you say. And suppose, also for the sake of argument, that the primary obligation of the US after 9/11 was to understand why the terrorists hate us and to stop whatever we were doing that upset them. My question is: Why does this primary obligation apply only the USA? Why aren’t those countries subjected to our alleged tyrannies also required to determine why we hate them and change what they are doing, too?
Twister, you’re making all us Democrats look stupid. If you have something to say, try starting with the real world. Nobody believes the stuff you’re writing any more, not even Howard Dean.
A short note.
I didn’t try to single out the US as the only country to bear the obligation. Rather, it’s a question of scale. The US is the most powerful country in the world, and she is capable of projecting her power globally. And with great power come great responsibility, if I may quote a comic book.
The Founding Fathers laid the foundation for this country to be the beacon of civilization in the world. To their credits, and also to the countless Americans who have advanced this ideal, America has truly become the one country everyone look up to. It is then a moral question where to lead the world.
I assure you, I don’t single out America as you assume I do. I have spoken out against the Chinese over the Tiannanmen Square butal massacre, but I was too young then to be able to taken too seriously. The public backlash against Muslim in the Netherlands following Theo van Gogh’s murder, I condemned it. I pray that North Korea regime will implode, leading the way for “people power” revolution, and when the day comes I am hoping that the US will rush to their side for support and guidance. I’ve had vigorous exchange about Turkish suppression of the Kurdish people. Those examples I hope will show you that I don’t single out the US. It may seems so simply because the life I have in the US, I deal daily with America, and thus whatever happen in America affects me greatly.
About the corporate boardroom reference, maybe it’s better I used the term “seeds of tyranny.” As you allude, and I wholeheartedly agree, greed can be a consuming temptation. The love of money is truly the roots of all evil, so to say.
Roo,
It was Kurt Waldheim.