That’s Diplomacy!

If an even temper and openness to opposing views are qualifications for a job at the U.N., you have to wonder if a hypothetical (shudder) Global Senate would confirm Kofi Annan after this freak-out:

[Annan] scolded James Bone of the Times of London for saying, “Your own version of events don’t really make sense.”

Annan responded: “I think you’re being very cheeky. Listen James Bone, you’ve been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let’s move on to a serious subject.”

. . . .

“We all have to be careful, whatever responsibilities we have, not to be fed by people with agendas.”

Asked again if he bought a Mercedes tax-free for his son, Kojo, with his diplomatic discount, Annan said, “I know you are all obsessed about the car. If you want to know more about it, please address yourself to my son or his lawyer.”

“I am neither his spokesman or his lawyer,” he said. “The report of Paul Volcker is clear. I am not going to rehash it.”

Here’s what Kojo Annan’s lawyer said. It gets much worse:

Asked about his regrets, Annan said he was sorry he was not able to avert the war in Iraq in 2003.

“If I go back in recent years, one thing I would have liked to see … is for us to have done everything that we could have done to avoid a war in Iraq that has brought such division within this organization and the international community,” Annan said.

“And that is one thing that I must say still haunts me and bothers me that, as an organization, as an international community, we were not able to do.”

And while it’s tempting to admire the man for staying bought, there’s the nagging feeling that a better man would have more regrets about the tyrannies were left to do their evil work than those who were plucked from the killing floor. And in Kofi’s very next breath, this:

Annan also said he hoped the U.N.’s biennial budget, now in contention, would be adopted by the end of the year, or the world body would face a financial crisis.

You don’t say. And that would be a bad thing, how?