Kofi Annan

No secretary-general of the United Nations has received the negative attention Kofi Annan has. It's not the kind of notice the leader of the most important world forum would want.

The abuses of the U.N's $65 billion oil-for-food program, which investigators are finding riddled with fraud, occurred on Annan's watch. Questions surround the role his son, Kojo Annan, may have played. The former head of the program, Benon Sevan, has been accused of a conflict of interest and of possibly pocketing $1.2 million himself from illegal Iraqi oil shipments. Saddam Hussein diverted $1.7 billion.

There's plenty of blame to go around, and lots of fingers are dirty. The fact that Iraq was selling oil out the back door was a poorly kept secret. But anyone who has seen the film "Hotel Rwanda" left the darkness angered and saddened once again by the U.N.'s perennially ineffectual response to human catastrophe.

Annan is mounting a public relations campaign aimed at burnishing his image for the two years remaining in his term of office. He is reorganizing the team that guides the U.N. and has named a new chief of staff who promises reforms and a full accounting of whatever went wrong with the oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general has called a world summit for September to discuss how the U.N. can counter international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and promote its goal of reducing poverty and disease. These are the most important issues in the world. Annan has six months to convince the world that the U.N. can do something good.