Consider Kofi Annan's role in the Rwandan genocide this is particularly offensive: he is a passive observer to two mass murders

After years of avoiding scrutiny of his role in allowing the Rwandan genocide to happen under his watch, former U.N. Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Kofi Annan is seemingly fine allowing more mass murders occur-this time in Syria. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Kofi Annan, the diplomat spearheading the latest international drive to stem Syria's violence, cautioned against armed foreign intervention in the country, a warning that suggests the international community will continue a diplomatic path that has so far failed to resolve the yearlong conflict.

"We have to be careful that we don't introduce a medicine that is worse than the disease," Mr. Annan told reporters Thursday at the Arab League's headquarters in Cairo, in a call echoed by Turkey's president. Mr. Annan added, in a veiled reference to Iraq: "We don't have to go very far in the region to find an example of what I am talking about."

He finally admitted back in 2004 that he could have done more (he could have actually done much more) to stop the genocide that happened in Rwanda 10 years before. From a BBC report:

The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he could and should have done more to stop the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago.

At a memorial conference at the UN, Mr Annan said he realised he personally could have done more to rally support for international efforts to stop it.

"The international community is guilty of sins of omission," Mr Annan said.

The genocide - in which some 800,000 people died - occurred when Mr Annan was head of UN peacekeeping forces. The UN Security Council failed to reinforce the small UN peacekeeping force in the country.

"The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret," Mr Annan said.

"I believed at that time that I was doing my best," he said.

"But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support."

Rwandans have accused the peacekeepers who were there at the time of failing to protect them.

In the twisted world of international relations nothing succeeds as much as incompetence, failure and the ability to hold one's own at cocktail parties and soirees.

But let's not be too harsh on Kofi Annan, years after the murder of hundreds of thousands of people -- that he refused to stop by ordering so-called peacekeeping forces to protect the victims -- he announced that "he was backing a call from the Rwandan government for the world to observe a minute of silence to remember the victims and resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

"Let us be united in a way we were not 10 years ago," he said."

He has a chance to stop another massacre and yet, again, he has failed to do so..

The phrase "never again" is meaningless to Kofi Annan-and to so many other diplomats and politicians.