New UN Secretary General: Is The Party Already Over?

And to think that things started out looking so promising...

• The Jerusalem Post reported that, Ban Ki-Moon was the first South Korean foreign minister to visit Israel and is generally considered to a friend of Israel.
  
  
• The Mail & Guardian reported that senior officials at the UN were unhappy with the appointment Ban Ki-Moon: a hopeful sign in itself.
  
  
• Haaretz reported that Ban Ki-Moon condemned Holocaust denial as well as Iran's call for the elimination of Israel.

But that was all last year. Come January 1 and according to the Jerusalem Post, the party is already over:

Ban Ki-Moon, the new secretary-general of the United Nations, said on Monday that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was at the core of solving all the problems in the Middle East.

..."If the issues with the conflicts between Israel and Palestine go well, [resolutions of] other issues in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Syria, are likely to follow suit.

On the bright side, Ban is considering some changes in personnel which supposedly could affect the way the UN operates in Israel and the West Bank. He is also supposedly planning on streamlining the UN bureaucracy.

But bottom line, Ban is already beginning to sound like Kofi Annan.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Ban "is not known to have developed expertise on the Middle East."--if Ban Ki-Moon owns up to that, he would be the first international figure to admit it.

Speaking of following in Kofi's footsteps:

Ban is temporarily residing at a hotel. He will not move into his official residence - an 85-year-old neo-Georgian town house on New York's fashionable Sutton Place overlooking the East River - until renovations (the first since 1950) are completed. The General Assembly recently approved $4.9 million to modernize the residence's heating, air conditioning, plumbing, kitchen and security, which is expected to take about nine months. [emphasis added]

This comes in the wake of Kofi's last scandal:

...after Kofi and his wife moved into the rent-free official UN residence at the beginning of 1997, their old low-rent taxpayer-subsidized apartment appears to have been passed to the family of his brother, Kobina Annan — who for some years has been serving as Ghana’s ambassador to Morocco, complete with an official residency in Rabat. [emphasis added]

The sooner Ban streamlines the bureaucracy, the better.
Unless, of course, he intends to become part of it.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Ban Ki-Moon and Kofi Annan.