John Kerry, should he be elected President, will go back to the UN on his hands and knees and beg for forgiveness. You know, the same UN that has stopped all the great world conflicts like...Um...well the UN. At least they can run a food program that feeds the people who need it most. OK, maybe not. Then what do they do well?

The tale has been all very interesting, and all very complicated. For those who look yearningly to the UN for answers to the world?s problems, it has provoked, perhaps, some introspection about the pardonable corruption that threatens even the most selfless undertakings. For those who believe the UN can do nothing right, Oil-for-Food, whatever it was about, is a delicious vindication that everyone and everything at the world organization is crooked, the institution a fiasco, and politicians who support it fit for recall at the next electoral opportunity.

The excitement may be justified, but a number of important facts and conclusions have gone missing. Oil-for-Food, run by the UN from 1996 to 2003, did, in fact, deliver some limited relief to Iraqis. It also evolved into not only the biggest but the most extravagant, hypocritical, and blatantly perverse relief program ever administered by the UN. But Oil-for-Food is not simply a saga of one UN program gone wrong. It is also the tale of a systematic failure on the part of what is grandly called the international community.

Read the entire, devastating, piece. The OFP was a scam that including Kofi Annan and the entire UN. What a disgrace. For more on the scandal read this blog daily. It's written by this guy.

I meant to post this yesterday. Lileks is starting get some play:

It plays to the base. The left is terribly worried about what the popular kids are saying about them in the United Nations. "We've alienated the world! For heaven's sake, we've alienated China! Oh, and Free Tibet!" The right couldn't care less, but what can you expect out of a party that would rather get married to Great Britain than have an affair with France? The undecided middle -- defined at this point as "people who aren't paying attention" -- is waiting to learn why we'd be safer trusting an organization whose response to Rwanda was to send not armies, but condolences. And even that took years.

One suspects that the number of undecided Americans may be fewer this week than the last -- at least if they heard about the U.N. reaction to Israel's ballistic dismissal of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas' leader-of-the-week. What a loathsome man he was. A architect of death and terror. Religious bigot, child-killer, slaughterer of fellow Arabs. Israel finally takes him out. The United Nations springs into action -- to consider a resolution to condemn the attack.

It was "extra-judicial," you see. Contrary to "international law." In the mind of a Eurocrat, whose paycheck demands belief in these ephemeral concepts, these are grave charges. To your average American, however, the strike on Rantisi was like a strike on Osama bin Laden. Anyone whose main objection to the death of a terrorist is its "extra-judicial" nature has odd priorities, particularly in wartime.

It's as if U.N. groupies think we should prop up "international law" so it'll be our shield when the tides turn against the West. As if a triumphant Hamas would petition The Hague for the right to exterminate the Jews before the final pogrom began.