Den of thieves.(The U.N.)

U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not. The mild-mannered Annan may not himself be corrupt. But he has presided over no less than the largest corruption scandal in the history of the world, Oil for Food. Never has the U.N. been more disrespectable or useless. Moreover, Annan's response to the scandal has been inadequate to the point of disgrace. That he still holds his post is testament to the culture of impunity that pervades the organization.

Annan's apparently congenital reluctance to move forcefully when necessity requires stems partly from his corporatist background: He has worked for the U.N. almost continuously since 1962. He is the original Organization Man, the first of the seven secretaries general to ascend to the top of the greasy pole from entirely within the U.N. He lacks the drive, and the desire, to tame the beast he inherited. Annan is a man willingly in thrall to his employer's unaccountable and inefficient bureaucracy, and a servant of its patronage machine.

To this end--protecting the U.N.'s comfortable status quo and keeping the gravy train rolling along--he has hindered efforts to uncover the massive scale of the Oil for Food fraud, a fraud involving his own staff. Through Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who heads Annan's "independent" commission looking into the Iraqi affair, he has apparently refused to release 55 internal audit reports and other key documents, such as interviews with senior U.N. staff, to a Senate investigative committee.

Though his commission lacks subpoena power, possesses little transparency, and labors under almost no external oversight--what else could be expected of a U.N. commission?--Volcker has promised to circulate a full, detailed report on the fraud next year. Already, however, five congressional hearings and three federal departmental investigations are discovering that the scandal is even larger than once believed: As much as $21.3 billion disappeared (double the original estimates), allegedly with the ...