Support Kofi Annan: Tale of Two Reports

By Ron WaltersNNPA Columnist The recent release of the Oil-for-Food report by the independent commission headed by Paul Volcker, looked into the issue of the mismanagement of the program by the United Nations and specifically whether Kofi Annan was culpable in a corrupt scheme involving his son. Suspicions were rife in the U. S. that Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, arranged or influenced the award by the oil-for-food program with a Swiss firm Cotecna Inspections with his son Kojo Annan as the middleman. This program was set up after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait as a sanctions measure to be administered by the United Nations. It would administer the sale of oil through contracts held by 4,000 firms, part of the proceeds from which would be sent to Saddam Hussein’s government to allow it to purchase food. In fact, it grew to a $64 billion program that reimbursed Hussein in a manner that allowed him to profit handsomely. And among the 4,000 firms, there arose the inevitable pattern of graft and corruption in the award of contracts and the handling of money through the UN. Republicans in the House have wanted blood, calling for Kofi Annan to step down from his job. To this demand, Annan pronounced ”hell no” that he wouldn’t go and he felt within his right, since the commission produced no proof that he was in any way liable for his son’s relationship with the European firm. So the headlines of most newspapers said that Kofi Annan was cleared of any wrong doing. However, some news reporters have been asking me whether I believe that these demands came partially because Kofi Annan’s race. While I do not believe that the major reason was race, the fact that Kofi is Black is a convenient motivation for many conservatives not to believe in his capability to manage the United Nations. The United Nations has long been a sore point to conservatives in the U. S. and especially so when it does not clearly facilitate American foreign policy. George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was not sanctioned by Kofi Annan and from that moment he became one of the enemies. Why not? The United Nations is an international agency that has a mandate to provoke the peaceful resolution of disputes, not to countenance war, especially preemptive war, where it was not clear that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to threaten anyone with weapons of mass destruction. In fact, although Saddam Hussein found a way to make some money from his own oil, his military capacity had been severely limited, both by the Gulf War of 1991 and by the quarantine maintained by the U. S. control of the Iraq air space. His dissent was squarely within his mandate as Secretary General. Now, there was another report just out by another independent U. S. Commission investigating the quality of the intelligence services that developed the view that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destructions. The commission reaffirmed what we now know, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But instead of the newspapers calling for the resignation of George Bush, they went after the intelligence agencies such as the CIA. George Tennet made his exit a few months ago because he knew that he would be made the fall-guy for the administration’s use of intelligence that many people knew was questionable. The report did not go into the allegations of some senior officials that the Bush administration came into office with a desire to invade Iraq. It did not look into the fact, widely reported, that the White House pressured the intelligence agencies at every point to, in fact, dig up dirt on Iraq, and to message the intelligence until it said something that was a worthy pretext to use to go to war. Nothing was said about that and since it didn’t, the report exists as part of a post-invasion cover-up to blame the bad intelligence on one or two agencies (the military agencies were exempt because that would have involved Bush’s budy, Donald Rumsfeld). The cover-up continues with the Bush adminstration having gone shameless into Iraq for the geopolitical purposes of the control of oil, the security of Israel and added the payoff of Bush’s campaign contributors, but discovered ”spreading Democracy” as a major theme. It’s almost sickening now that some Democrats have taken the bait that there has been a pivotal turn American motivations with promoting elections, which are supposed to justify this ill-timed, ill-conceived and ill-managed adventure. Give me Kofi Annan any day and save the double standard. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute in the Academy of Leadership and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland-College Park.