New UN Chief Might Turn Out Okay

It's too early to tell, but new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has already engaged in more politically incorrect behavior on his first day in office than Kofi Annan did during his entire term:

New U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ran into trouble on his first day of work Tuesday over Saddam Hussein's execution when he failed to state the United Nations' opposition to the death penalty and said capital punishment should be a decision of individual countries.

The U.N. has an official stance opposing capital punishment and Ban's predecessor Kofi Annan reiterated it frequently. The top U.N. envoy in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, restated it again on Saturday after the former Iraqi dictator was hanged.

Ban, however, took a different approach, never mentioning the U.N. ban on the death penalty in all its international tribunals, and the right to life enshrined in the U.N. Charter.

"Saddam Hussein was responsible for committing heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities against Iraqi people and we should never forget victims of his crime," Ban said in response to a reporter's question about Saddam's execution Saturday for crimes against humanity. "The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide."

His ambiguous answer put a question mark over the U.N.'s stance on the death penalty. It also gave the new chief an early taste of how tricky global issues are, and how every word can make a difference.

The AP writer may consider his answer "ambiguous" but I don't. It sounds plenty clear to me. Hopefully this guy is much more in favor of the rights of individual countries to carry out their own laws rather than have to ascribe to some "global world authority" as was promoted by Kofi Annan and his predecessors.