KOFI ANNAN, THE TYRANTS' FRIEND
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November 9, 2004 -- U.S. and Iraqi forces last night were heavily engaged in what may well be the decisive battle for Iraq's future.

People of good will everywhere wish them well — but U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wishes Operation Phantom Fury never got started.

Last week, Annan wrote President Bush and Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Iyad Allawi, warning that an assault on Fallujah would alienate Iraqis and make it difficult to carry out the coming elections.

Annan can't possibly be that naive.

He's not; he simply opposes U.S. power. He opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, calling the war in Iraq "illegal." And he opposes Phantom Fury.

But Fallujah's terrorists are the key impediment to elections. Their bombings and beheadings are meant to sow fear, so Iraqis won't go to the polling booths.

Allawi, Bush and Blair understand that removing them and curbing their attacks will make the nation safer for elections.

But not Annan. "The threat or actual use of force not only risks deepening the sense of alienation . . . but would also reinforce perceptions . . . of a continued military occupation," he wrote.

How exactly does bringing terrorists to justice represent "military occupation" — when Iraqis themselves constitute a significant number of Coalition forces?

And when it was Iraq's prime minister who ordered the offensive?

How can Iraqis fighting terrorists be seen as an "occupation"?

Indeed, Allawi was said to be "furious" with Annan, and called him "confused."

That's charitable.

Annan has spent most of his life with the world body and seems to have been wholly corrupted by it.

It's more than the bribery and theft he permitted under the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program. Annan has long done the bidding of the dictators and thugs who comprise the institution and view it as tool with which to bludgeon the West.

To Kofi Annan, no regime, no matter how ruthless and criminal, should ever be called to account.

Meanwhile, terror-supporting nations like Libya, Syria and Iran are given leadership — leadership! — roles on panels like the U.N. Human Rights Commission and even the Security Council.

Sometimes, the United Nations openly employs terrorists. Recently, Peter Hansen, of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refuges in the Near East, actually tried to defend hiring Hamas thugs.

The United Nations didn't lift a finger to stop the genocide in Rwanda, and today it's allowing horrific violence to plague the Sudan.

At home, it's a cesspool of corruption, where charges of theft or employee harassment are hardly unheard of.

This is the body headed by the man now siding with terrorists in Fallujah.

Annan and the U.N. deserve each other. But the Iraqi people deserve better than either.

Operation Phantom Fury is their best chance of getting something better.

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