Gunning for Kofi

Washington

Two of the world’s most impressive spin machines are locked in deadly combat. On the one side is the mob that Hillary Clinton once called ‘the vast right-wing conspiracy’, a bunch of conservative US senators and congressmen, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and his New York Post, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and the National Review, all calling for the head of United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Kofi must go, they thunder, because Saddam Hussein was allowed to trouser over $20 billion in the UN’s oil-for-food scandal which happened on Annan’s watch. This is a serious matter and there is a great deal of blame to go around a large number of people — and the UN administration that Annan runs. But what really offends the nationalist Right is Annan’s wimpish effrontery in calling Bush’s Iraq war ‘illegal in terms of the UN charter’. (In fact this was the fault of the BBC, whose reporter badgered poor Annan into using the word ‘illegal’ — which he now privately regrets.