Assignment U.N.

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One of the first jobs Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice must undertake is a review of continued United States participation or even membership in the United Nations. For U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and a majority of U.N. members, many of them dictatorships and enemies of democracy, can only be regarded as enemies of the world's most successful democracy.

The U.N. General Assembly, a haven of anti-Americanism, regularly condemns one country, Israel, another democracy, as a putative violator of human rights. Over and over again the U.N. General Assembly has stigmatized Israel by overwhelming majority votes while ignoring human-rights violators like Cuba and North Korea. This is the institution Kofi Annan calls -- no snickering, please -- "the indispensable home of the human family."

Mr. Annan interfered in our presidential election with his announcement last month, during the campaign, that several hundred tons of weapons had gone missing during the American military intervention. The purpose of this Annan "leak" was to defeat President Bush's reelection bid. Earlier, Kofi Annan had pronounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq illegal.

Saddam Hussein's genocidal practices were never criticized by Mr. Annan nor were they ever called "illegal." But the overthrow of one of the worst human-rights violators since Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot -- that was illegal. Should American taxpayers, continue to pay 25 percent of the U.N. budget?

The oil-for-food program, organized by U.N. officials appears to have created one of the largest scandals in all recorded history. Kofi Annan has refused to cooperate with a Congressional committee investigating the oil scandal. And then there's the human-rights scandal. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) has mocked the entire concept of human rights. Its recent chairman was from Libya where human rights do not exist. Seats on the UNCHR have been occupied by human-rights violators like China, Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The massacres of black Africans in Darfur, Sudan, by Sudanese Muslims should have been a first order of business for the United Nations. It was not.

The current issue of Commentary magazine carries a devastating article titled "The case against the U.N.," written by Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Muravchik writes:

"A world left to the U.N. as supreme arbiter would not be the world of law of Kofi Annan's incantation. It would be the opposite: a world of lawlessness. Nor would a United States that had been induced to yield to the superior majesty of the U.N. be replaced by an equivalent force for good, and certainly not by the U.N. itself. Instead, the peace we have known since 1945 would crumble."

Condoleezza Rice needs to take a hard look at the United Nations and ask what good, after six decades, does this institution do in furthering world peace, or in furthering democracies so essential to keeping the world at peace. Above all, what has the United Nations done to delegitimize U.N. members, especially Islamo-fascist countries, which practice and encourage terrorism? And with a look at the future and the possibility of more Islamo-fascist terrorist attacks a la September 11, 2001, Miss Rice should ask: What help can victims of these assassins in New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Jerusalem and Nairobi expect from the U.N., especially from that miserable body called the General Assembly?

We know the answer. The next question is: What must the United States do about it?

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times. His updated biography "Herman Wouk, the Novelist as Social Historian," has just been published.