WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lamented a speech by retiring UN chief Kofi Annan criticising US foreign policy on Monday as a “real missed opportunity”.Always the diplomat.
In an interview with AFP, Rice criticized AnnanÂ’s failure in the much-awaited speech to highlight the positive role she said Washington had played at the world body over the past two years.
“I would have hoped that it would have talked about the work that we’ve done together,” she said, recalling the joint launch of a global fund for AIDS, a recent resolution aimed at halting the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region and the UN ceasefire which ended the July-August war in Lebanon. “That ceasefire would not have happened without the United States,” she said.
We're Americans. We don't get much credit in the world for the good we do, and we never get credit when a Republican is President.
“I can go on and on about the positive things we have achieved in this period of time, and so I’m sorry that those were not the focus of the speech,” she said. “The speech is a real missed opportunity,” she said.
Kofi was a missed opportunity.