Kofi Annan Quotes
When the US withdrew their troops from Somalia, I recall making a comment that [in] the way the peacekeepers had been withdrawn from Somalia, the impression had been given that the easiest way to unravel a peacekeeping operation is to kill a few soldiers.
Annan, Kofi, and Nader Mousavizadeh. Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Penguin Press, 2012.
Iraq has always been a military and political quagmire. 60 years later the United States, in the Iraq War, would run into problems without the cooperation of the local populations and tribes. American war planners all but ignored the British experience and ended up with similar difficulties. See {586424} for another example.
3 years later he led America on a huge invasion and nation building project in Iraq. It turned out that had he listened to his own advice and not flip-flopped, the huge cost of the Iraq War might have been avoided.
Ikle wrote this over a decade before both the military and civilian leaders fell into this trap in the 1994 Iraq War.
This was one of several petitions that were sent to the President by groups of scientists who were working on the development of the atomic bomb. The major objective of the scientists was to demonstrate the power of the bomb before it was used. The President did not select this policy of demonstration as the invasion of the Japanese mainland was imminent and America only had two bombs—one a uranium and the other, plutonium. If the demonstration would not produce the unconditional surrender, then there would only be one weapon left and it would take months to produce another. This was the strongest argument against using up a bomb. It was somewhat borne out when the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It took the second.
The Senator was criticizing President George W. Bush, who made a show of flying onto an aircraft carrier in combat uniform and then announcing the end of the Iraq war with banners flying saying “Mission Accomplished.” His announcement and publicity stunt was very premature as American military casualties continued thereafter.
Kofi Atta Annan was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organization founded by Nelson Mandela.
