UNITED NATIONS, Dec 12: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday joined conservative Republican lawmakers in attacking United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the speech in which he had chided the Bush administration for undermining the human rights the world over in its war against terror.

Ms Rice said Mr Annan's speech -- his last in the United States as secretary-general -- was a ‘missed opportunity’ for failing to highlight cooperation between the UN and the US on the global fund for Aids and efforts to stop the ethnic-based killing of civilians in Sudan's Darfur region.

Henry Hyde, the retiring chairman of the house international relations committee, accused Mr Annan of presiding over “rampant financial and moral mismanagement at the UN”. Newt Gingrich, the former house speaker, said he was a failure who was treated like a success out of politeness.

“It would be so impolite to treat him as the failure he's been," Mr Gingrich said on a television channel.

“The speech might well get Kofi Annan the Nobel prize because it was anti-American,” he said.

Senator Norm, a strong critic of the UN, said Mr Annan's 10 years as secretary-general represented “failed leadership at a time when the UN needed to play a critical role in the developing global community”.

But the UN chief had an ally in Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. "I've had a lot to do with Kofi Annan over the last 10 years and I think very highly of him," Mr Downer said in Washington.

“He's a man of great integrity and decency and he's always been a good friend to me and a good friend to Australia. I think he's done that extraordinarily difficult job in very trying circumstances.”

On Monday, Mr Annan, speaking at the Harry Truman presidential library in Missouri, said traditional US leadership on human rights could be maintained only “if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism”.

In a clear reference to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programme, he said: “When it (the US) appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused. “States need to play by the rules towards each other, as well as towards their own citizens. That can sometimes be inconvenient, but ultimately what matters is not convenience. It is doing the right thing.”

In what appeared a direct reference to the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Mr Annan said that “no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others.”

“We all share responsibility for each other's security and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves,” he said.

“When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose -- for broadly shared aims -- in accordance with broadly accepted norms.

“The US has given the world an example of a democracy in which everyone, including the most powerful, is subject to legal restraint. Its current moment of world supremacy gives it a priceless opportunity to entrench the same principles at the global level.”