Kofi Annan is mad. That’s right, Robert Mugabe is still plundering the entire country of Zimbabwe, and Kofi has to take time away from shredding Oil-for-Food documents to read a 100 page report about it. Hey, if I were the head of an ineffective international institution and I had to read about something I couldn’t do anything about, I’d be mad too.

UNITED NATIONS, July 22 – The United Nations today condemned the mass destruction of urban slums and shantytowns in Zimbabwe by the government of Robert G. Mugabe as a “disastrous venture,” saying it had left 700,000 people homeless and created a “humanitarian crisis of immense proportions.”

In a tough-worded report, the United Nations demanded that the activity be stopped immediately, that compensation and assistance be arranged for victims and that the leaders of the campaign be prosecuted.

The report also suggested that the operation could amount to a case of crime against humanity.

In an accompanying statement that called the report “profoundly distressing,” Secretary General Kofi Annan said, “I call on the government to stop these forced evictions and demolitions immediately, and to ensure that those who orchestrated this ill-advised policy are held fully accountable for their actions.”

Mr. Annan said the United Nations would “urgently” seek agreement with the government in Harare to mobilize assistance “on the scale that is required to avert further suffering.” He urged the government to recognize the state of emergency and give free access to international aid workers.

I see they serve lots of Kool-Aid at the UN. Only up in their ivory tower would the idea of further cooperation with a totalitarian government be seen as the best way to stop genocide. Perhaps it hasn’t struck him that there are no shady architects behind this institutionalized, regimen oppression. Mugabe is the one and only. Everything the government in Zimbabwe does is because he allows it.

But wait, that’s exactly what the report is suggesting!

The 100-page report, compiled after a two-week fact-finding trip by Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian expert in rural economics, said that removals were “carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering” and left Zimbabwe in “a virtual state of emergency” from which it would take years to emerge.

While the report said that the government of Zimbabwe was “collectively responsible” for what has occurred, it laid direct blame on an unnamed “few architects” of the policy and said the people of Zimbabwe should hold them accountable.

At a press conference, Mrs. Tibaijuka turned aside repeated questions over whether Mr. Mugabe himself wasn’t one of the plan’s architects. “I was not sent on an exercise to apportion blame,” she said. She also declined to say whether Mr. Mugabe had expressed any remorse over the victims in either of the two meetings she had with him.

Speaking less diplomatically in her report, she said, “It remains the strong recommendation of the envoy that the culprits who have caused this man-made disaster be brought to book.”

Of course, the UN will do anything that doesn’t involve direct action and moral clarity. Why not blame Mugabe? He is the man directly responsible, he’s the one causing the “humanitarian crisis of immense proportions” that they cite like pseudo-intellectual English majors. But let me digress and apologize to all of the English majors out there.

Anna Tibaijuka should be commended for her incredible and brave work. It’s not her fault. It’s a fault of leadership. In the report, she recommends that those responsible be “brought to book.” Of course, that doesn’t mean direct intervention to Annan. It means cleaning up the mess that Mugabe made in his room and forgetting to hit him with the belt.

It is sad and ironic that the UN can subsequently call what is happening in Zimbabwe a humanitarian crisis of immense proportions while allowing it to serve on the Commission for Human Rights alongside bosom buddies Sudan and China. This is what happens when an organization meant for bettering the world drops the soap. No, not the ball. The soap. Because bending over is exactly what the UN does.

Kofi Annan’s lack of moral clarity and unwillingness to act detail much deeper problems that even their use of exceptionally large words cannot describe. This document was supposed to be the “it” report, the ultimate in evidence against one of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet. Yet for all the strong words, they were directed at nobody in particular. And if strong words are all that Kofi Annan has, then we can mark this very minute as the last chance the United Nations had to prove itself on preventing genocide in Zimbabwe.