Coming UN-done.(Goodbye to the U.N.)

The United Nations spent most of its existence between 1953 and 1990 in a virtual coma. Then, on the eve of the first Gulf War its members came together to isolate Saddam Hussein and roll back his invasion of Kuwait. But 12 years later, somewhere along the road to Baghdad, the United Nations died.

The U.N. is not going to cease to exist in name, of course. But it has already ceased to exist in practice. Recall that it took eight weeks for the Security Council to agree on a resolution requiring Iraq to comply with existing resolutions. And that came only after President Bush threw down the gauntlet: "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

According to its charter, the U.N. is supposed to be an instrument for "the maintenance of international peace and security." But instead of functioning like a useful tool, the U.N. has come to think of itself as an end in itself. French president Jacques Chirac condemned the deposing of Saddam Hussein because it was "undertaken without the approval of the United Nations ... which is the only legitimate framework for building peace in Iraq."

If the U.N. is the sole source of legitimacy for "building peace," Chirac has some explaining of his own to do. On the very same week that coalition forces attacked Saddam's regime, after all, hundreds of French troops poured into the Central African Republic to protect French interests there after a coup, and France didn't ask the U.N. for pre-approval. And during the U.N.'s farcical peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, Chirac "issued ... orders to the French generals in Bosnia ... that went outside the U.N. command system," as David Halberstam notes in War in a Time of Peace.

Also in 2003, Chirac threatened East European governments for siding with Washington rather than Paris on Iraq: "If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining the EU," he snarled, "they couldn't have chosen a better way." It seems Washington doesn't have a monopoly on unilateralism.

The balking from Paris and Moscow when the U.S. and Britain asked for a lifting of the U.N. sanctions on Iraq was another nice bit of international hypocrisy. The French began a concerted push to end U.N. sanctions on Iraq back in January 1999, characterizing them as cruel to the Iraqi people. The Russians called ...