It’s often said that the U.N. failed in re- cent years, most notably over the war in Iraq. Yet, what really failed was unilateralist U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Ad- ministration’s decision to launch a war without the backing of the U.N. Security Council – indeed with the clear international message that the case for war had not been made – weakened the U.N. in the short term, but bolstered the case for the U.N. in the longer term. The real de- feat, and hopefully a lasting one, has been to the Bush Administration’s unilateralist reveries, which were always divorced from global realities.

The standing of the U.S. in the world has been damaged by this unilateralism, and so too has the reputation of the U.N., at least in the short term. The damage has been amplified by the Oil-for-Food scan- dal. Yet even in the context of the scan- dal, U.S. politics is at play. The scandal is being cynically exploited by U.S. politicians to weaken the U.N., rather than to improve its operations. Indeed, the in- tense criticism of U.N. management is coming from a Government whose own Iraq Occupation Authority cannot ac- count for billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenues since 2003, with the clear indication that vast sums have in fact been looted.

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