The Last Thing Iraqis Need.

Unfortunately, I am a lousy tennis player. Otherwise I would have had a great time in So Tome, a wonderful equatorial island off the Atlantic coast of Africa. My friend, a United Nations employee, played every day, early in the morning and at twilight, when the temperature was bearable. The tennis courts belonged to the only five-star hotel in the capital. The rest of the hot day, he retreated into the air-conditioned hotel, where he sometimes held meetings. I was the only "normal" guest. All the others belonged to one U.N. agency or another, and I found this to be true for many of the luxury hotels in Africa. Keeping them occupied is perhaps the main contribution of U.N. officials to the local economies they are unsuccessfully advising.

I am amazed that as Saddam Hussein statues were toppled all over Iraq last week, all my fellow Europeans could talk about was the importance of U.N. rule in the country, and the danger of a long-term American occupation. They've got it backward. Wherever the United Nations goes, it tends to stay forever, and to perpetuate problems. It's been in Bosnia for eight years now, in Kosovo and East Timor for four, in the Palestinian territories since'48. In Gaza the U.N. agency running the refugee camps is the main purveyor of jobs. I am a refugee's son myself: my father fled the territories that Italy lost to Yugoslavia in 1945. After a few months all 350,000 refugees had found jobs, houses, new lives. There was no U.N. presence, which was perhaps their good fortune.

Today there is no sign that the United Nations will leave Bosnia or Kosovo. No solution for Cyprus after almost 30 years. Nevertheless, "U.N." has become a magic phrase, the last redoubt for pacifists. Even my paper--the largest Italian weekly, normally quiet and middle-of-the- road--has turned pacifist: for Christmas it published an article by a Catholic bishop against the war, and as counterbalance an article by a former communist against the war.

I was once a pacifist demonstrator myself, fighting the placement of U.S. nuclear cruise missiles in Sicily. But now I don't mind anybody getting rid of Saddam, by any means necessary. We Italians should know: Rome invented the word "dictator," the first modern dictator was Italian (Adolf Hitler was a pupil of Benito Mussolini) and even Silvio Berlusconi, our current premier, has been called by his adversaries the model of the postmodern ...