What is it about the UN in this country? Why is held in such passionate and disproportionate esteem? When I attacked Kofi Annan recently for some particularly stupid observations he had made about Iraq, the response was as vitriolic and hysterical as it would have been 20 years ago if I had suggested that Bishop Casey was having it off with a young one, or that the Norbertine order was protecting a child rapist, or that Father Michael Cleary had got his housekeeper pregnant, writes Kevin Myers
The truth is that the UN is corrupt, as are many of its officials. It is not quite a useless instrument, but it is a deeply flawed one, vide the scandal over the Iraqi oil sanctions. These were proposed as the alternative to armed action by the US to enforce Saddam's submission to international will and to countless UN resolutions. We know now that, far from making Saddam weaker, they made him stronger. He controlled the issuing of the oil vouchers. Not merely did he enrich himself enormously by the manipulation of the vouchers, there are credible allegations that he debauched senior UN officials with them.
Sanctions worked only in the sense that they made poor Iraqis poorer and unwell Iraqis dead. But they did nothing to remove the regime. Nor would they have done had they continued for another decade or two, by which Saddam's delightful sons would have been running the country.
We all know stupid, terrible mistakes were made in the preparation for the war of liberation in Iraq, the foremost being the failure to create civil administration teams to take over the running of Iraqi cities the moment Ba'athist power was broken. Both of us who supported the war in this country assumed that deep thought had gone into both the short-term and long-term plans to run Iraq, and in that assumption we were disappointed - but not as disappointed as the unfortunate people of Iraq.
Now the civilised world has no choice but to assist the US in the stabilisation of Iraq, and we cannot rely on an unreformed UN to do it for us. This is not stupidity or weakness or abject submission to US will, but self-interest. The civilised world cannot allow a country which has approximately 50 per cent of the world's known oil reserves to fall into the hands of a lunatic sect that sends suicide bombers to blow up children queuing to receive sweets or beheads living men by slicing from the throat backwards.
It's not as if there is an interesting array of options for us to choose from. We have to help the Americans in whatever way we can; and since we have no military skills which are - for the moment - of use to them, we might as well consider what else we can do.
Well, one thing we have learnt in the past 30 years of EEC/EU membership is that we have, by international standards, one of the finest public services in Europe. This is particularly true in the Department of Agriculture, which a few years ago was even running Greece. The existence of a caste of honest administrators is a vital ingredient of both the creation of a successful state and the building of regional loyalties.
Indeed, one of the central features of the Irish State which emerged after 1922 was how loyalties transferred from what was perceived as the 32-county nation to the 26-county state. That entirely unintentional reassignment of affection was caused by many factors, but one was the existence of an administrative class that was in tempo with the people being administered, and whose probity was never in doubt.
That is what Iraq needs if it has a future. So why should we not take in a few hundred Iraqis, either in exile or recruited from Iraq itself, to train them in the recondite arts of administration? I know: this will not satisfy the national appetite for US-bashing, nor will it placate those who worship at the false shrine that is the UN. But it is something we can and should be doing - and moreover, we should be urging other EU countries to be doing the same.
The sooner the US and its allies get out of Iraq the better - provided, that is, a regime of infanticides and decapitators doesn't succeed in its place. The longer-term guarantee of the security and peace of the Iraqi people will depend on the existence of a literate, law-abiding class of administrators. Consider how that class in a post-civil war Ireland managed to knit together the various and recently-fratricidal strands of Irish life. How great the debt we owe to people such as Sean Lester, John Leyden, James McElligott and Timothy O'Driscoll. They worked tirelessly for a state which neither side in the Civil War had actually wanted, and neither believed was going to remain in existence for very long.
Yet that State has now proved to be one of the most vigorous and successful in Europe. And the existence of an honest public service was central to creating an affection for it, even among those who had been resolutely opposed to its formation.
Moreover, the heirs to those founding administrative fathers oversaw the boom of the past 15 years.
Iraq began its journey from empire around the same time as we did, but its misfortune was to have oil, causing endless covetous interference from abroad and megalomaniac usurpation from within. It is in our interest - and Europe's - to help bring long-term peace to Iraq. There are Mesopotamian McElligotts waiting to be trained. Let us and our EU partners start training them.