Searching through the haystack

of this article by Paul Reynolds at BBConline I couldn’t find a needle of criticism or even meaningful analysis of the UN. Maybe you’ll be luckier. All I found was Reynolds regurgitating Mr Annan’s lofty sayings and emphasising how important they were at a time when there is a lot of ‘hostility’ in the US:

‘In the United States, there is still hostility to the UN and Mr Annan’s own position has been weakened by the oil-for food programme, in which his own son has been the subject of inquiry.’

Here’s Reynolds’ laughable version of powerful ‘for and against’ arguments in the US (hint, it’s not the arguments that are powerful, just the pedigree of the arguers, as is usual with Reynolds. Almost as laughable is the title ‘High Level group’ conferred on one advisory panel Annan has drawn on):

‘The former American UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a Democrat, who negotiated an end to the Bosnian war, said: “Without us the UN will fail. And if it fails, we will be among the many losers.”

But another UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a terse statement, said that “only the officers and functionaries of the UN” could “restore confidence in the United Nations”.’

However, I could find some useful stuff from Claudia Rosett. She knows how to needle:

‘in much the same way that despots faced with popular unrest like to announce giant patriotic dam-building projects involving the pouring of huge amounts of cement, Mr. Annan is presenting his new improved save-the-world reform plan, conveniently timed to serve as a distraction from the oil-for-fraud, sex-for-food, theft, waste, abuse and incompetence stories that for the past two years have bubbling up around the same U.N. he already reformed for us back in 1997.’

But here’s where she’s sure to get Reynolds and co’s sacred goat:

‘The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century.’

Ouch.