I shall miss this guy

There are certain people in and around political life who are so truly awesome in their sheer ghastliness that their promised disappearance fills me with gloom. Will Sarah Brown, for instance, should her husband ever become Prime Minister, provide me with quite as much entertainment as the egregious Cherie Blair has done and will do for a few more months? I honestly do not think so.

Another one I shall miss (though, I suspect not for long as he will turn up as one of the transnational brotherhood of the great and the good) is SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo). While the dear old UN will go on in its inimitable fashion, Kofi's successor is unlikely to be quite as monstrously entertaining as the ineffable Ghanaian has been. In fact, if Democrat politicians and tranzi-lovers across the world had any brains they would realize that the man who has done most harm to their beloved cause in the last few years has been SecGen Annan.

The man has been pronouncing again and as stupidly and ignorantly as ever. According to Associated Press, the organization with the interesting journalists and non-existent police officers as sources, the SecGen has been musing to the British Broadcasting Corp. on Iraq then and now:

In the BBC interview, Annan agreed when it was suggested that some Iraqis believe life is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein's regime.

"I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi's life," Annan said. "If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, 'Am I going to see my child again?'

Yes, indeed, even if the next time you saw your child will be in one of the mass graves uncovered since the toppling of Saddam. My memory may be failing but I do not recall the SecGen making any comments about those many mass graves, some filled only with bodies of children.

There are other aspects of Iraqi life about which the SecGen has forgotten. For instance, there was the small matter of the many thousands being murdered by poison gas in Halabja. By the way, does that count as use of WMDs?

Then there was the mass murder in brutal circumstances of Shias in 1991. Men, women and children were burnt alive. Others were tortured, then murdered. Did they see their children again? And those are only two particularly nasty episodes in the very nasty rule of that mild-mannered Saddam Hussein.

Above all, however, the SecGen has forgotten who is killing children in Iraq. Who are the people who line up vans full of explosives next to a market of a queue of children who are being handed out sweets? Could it be that some of Saddam’s henchmen are still at work? The SecGen tells us nothing about that.

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