POWER PLAYS.(The Talk of the Town)

The air of corruption that clouds the United Nations these days cannot simply be fanned away by forcing the resignation of Kofi Annan as Secretary-General, as a growing number of prominent Republicans have been urging. Their pretext is the accumulating allegations of complicity of U.N. officials in scams that transformed the oil-for-food program in Saddam Hussein's Iraq into a racketeering enterprise whose single greatest beneficiary--to the tune of twenty billion dollars--was the tyrant himself. Last week, Annan was obliged to admit that his son Kojo had "disappointed" him by taking payments from a Swiss firm that the U.N. had hired to monitor Iraq's imports while under U.N. sanctions. And the Secretary-General has also been called on to answer complaints of widespread sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers in the field and accusations from the U.N. employees' union of a lackadaisical attitude toward sexual harassment by U.N. officials.

Annan bristles at the insinuations of corruption in his ranks, but, in truth, his tenure was tainted from the beginning. In the mid-nineties, when he was head of peacekeeping, he presided over catastrophically failed missions in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where he ignored detailed warnings of genocide, then watched them come true, while the world did nothing to stop it. Those world leaders who later hailed him as a moral exemplar at best ignored that history, at worst regarded it as a kind of credential: since Annan was a compromised figure, they did not have to fear his censure. In theory, Annan's departure at this point could create an opportunity for institutional revival. But the pervasive suspicion at U.N. headquarters is that President Bush, who flaunted his contempt for the Geneva convention by nominating as his attorney general the lawyer he employed to find a legal justification for torture, is looking not to revive the world body but to retire it.

In Nova Scotia last week, Bush announced that "building effective multinational and multilateral institutions, and supporting effective multilateral action" would be the foremost foreign-policy goals of his second term. But the olive branch he held out to the Canadians and the rest of America's erstwhile allies was purely rhetorical. The President made it clear that he still believes that other countries should multilaterally fall in line behind his unilateral decisions. In his view, America didn't fail to win the U.N.'s support for the war in Iraq; the U.N. failed to support America. And just as Annan calls the war illegal, Bush calls the U.N.'s withholding of support a refusal to enforce the law of its anti-Saddam resolutions.

In this respect, the oil-for-food scandal, in which French and Russian notables (as well as some Texans) are also allegedly implicated, serves the Administration's defensive assault on the U.N. Never mind that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to us; while Bush was in Nova Scotia, Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, who is in charge of a Senate investigation into the oil-for-food program, called for Annan's resignation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing, essentially, that it had been necessary to go to war in Iraq simply to bring an end to the U.N.'s role as Saddam's enabler. (The war, it now seems, was neither preemptive nor preventive but punitive, and Annan was among those who needed ...