Annan’s tenure and U.N. both failures

Re “Kofi Annan’s tough love,” editorial, Dec. 18

Reading the paean to United Nations SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, in which he is compared to President Truman, following the Dec. 11 editorial that compared former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (“Dictators right and left”), makes one wonder if the editorial board isn’t frequenting the bar in “Star Wars.” To suggest that the U.N. values human rights, democracy and the rule of law is not merely risible but borders on obscene. The Times mentions the “new” Human Rights Council but fails to mention that its membership mirrors the discredited Human Rights Committee it replaced. In fact many, if not most, U.N. members are not democrats but thugs, kleptocrats and tyrants who care not one whit about human rights or the rule of law. The Times can’t point to any sustained U.N. program initiated and carried out under Annan that advances the ideals it claims he holds. He has simply posed while the U.N. has veered from scandal to scandal. The Times is confused, morally and logically, in believing that talk need never lead to action. That belief has always been a danger to peace and freedom; it is more so today.

KENT SCHMIDT

La Canada Flintridge

*

The use of “talk smack” in an editorial is inexcusable. I’m not even sure what that means, although the meaning can be inferred. It is difficult observing the degradation of the English language into street slang by The Times’ editorial writers.

RICHARD MACMINN

Hollywood Hills

*

The editorial lauding Annan and chastising President Bush is a stunning example of the left’s willful obfuscation of Annan’s horrible tenure at the U.N. Annan is directly responsible for, or negligently failed to stop, the Darfur killing fields, United Nations rape rooms in the Congo and the Annan family plundering of the Oil for Food funds from innocent Iraqis while sustaining Saddam Hussein. Yet The Times justifies Annan because he needs to “play an adversarial role with the United States” so as to not “lose legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.” Why the dictators’ club has legitimacy is never explained because, with the blame-America-first crowd, the U.S. is always the greater evil. That The Times complains about the speck in our eye while legitimizing the plank in the eye of the axis of evil bespeaks deceitfulness, cowardice and moral confusion.

DON RORY

Los Angeles