Ah! Where are you now, all those who said that Saddam Hussein should have been left to the UN to deal with, asks Kevin Myers.
For here we have it: last week's astounding revelation that senior UN officials and, implicitly, two permanent members of the Security Council helped to break sanctions against Iraq. These would almost be entertaining if they were not so murderously awesome in their implications.
According to the report by Claude Hankes-Drieslma, acting on behalf of the Iraqi Governing Council, the biggest humanitarian programme in the UN's history had provided the dictator "and his corrupt and evil regime with a convenient vehicle through which he bought support internationally by bribing other political parties, companies and journalists, and other individuals of influence". Before the war to liberate Iraq, that entire bloc of left-liberal opinion across the world, plus a few governments, had two solutions to the intransigence of Saddam's regime. One, the solution had to be through the UN, but two, sanctions didn't work, because they only caused the poor of Iraq to die. That is to say, they had no solution. For Saddam's regime had regularly taken journalists around hospitals to see children dying "because of sanctions", despite the UN food-for-oil programme which should have ensured that no child died.
We now know that Saddam gave certain supporters vouchers with which to buy and trade in Iraqi oil, a scam worth billions of dollars. One alleged beneficiary was Benon Sevan, the senior UN official who was in charge of the oil-for-food programme.
Numerous companies, especially French and Russian, also benefited. Meanwhile, the French government used its position in the UN to further France's commercial interests in Iraq, right up until the invasion by US-led forces of liberation last year.
The scam not merely embraced useful bodies through which to sell Iraqi oil; it also involved the purchase by Iraqi officials of rotten food and out-of-date or ineffectual drugs. The companies - mostly Russian - supplying such rubbish thereby profited from sanctions, as did the Iraqi officials, themselves - as indeed did Saddam Hussein. Thus UN sanctions, rotten food and bad medicines gave him propaganda aplenty for gullible journalists who were routinely escorted through the Saddam Hussein Children's Hospital to see - and write moving colour stories about - the plight of the dying infants there.
UN sanctions also gave Saddam a monopoly on who bought and sold oil, making him richer than he already was. Why should he prove that he had no weapons of mass destruction, as he hadn't, thereby ending the sanctions which had actually intensified his grip on the country? UN sanctions and UN officials turned out to be the finest friends he had.
What I truly don't understand is how few people in Ireland or anywhere seem to accept how corrupt, ineffectual and contemptible the UN has become. The mere invocation of its name is still enough to suggest a panacea to all the world's problems, though the UN has been present, inept and inert at some of the great world tragedies: the Congo, (repeatedly), Rwanda, Bosnia, and of course Iraq. Indeed, apart from being perhaps the world largest purchaser of top-of-the-range 4x4s (the only vehicle a UN official will ever get into) and first-class airline tickets, it is hard to know what important global function the UN retains.
Has it any role in Iraq? Perhaps, if only to provide a fig-leaf to whatever the US is going to do anyway. The US established the UN, and now it must give it its lead, and if, as before, the French threaten a veto, then the US will have to forge ahead anyway, regardless of world opinion. Moreover, merely because I am critical of the pretext for war, and of President Bush's unconditional and insane support for Israeli settlements on the West Bank, does not mean I have changed sides.
For a procession of UN failures and UN corruption aided by a plague of bien-pensant anti-Americanism had brought the world to a pass where state tyranny and global terrorism, two different sides of the one coin, believed they would never be confronted militarily. Now they know they were wrong. History is being made in Iraq today - and tragically and bloodily too, which is why brainless cheering of the war is an inexcusable obscenity. But the war is what we've got, with no way out of it, other than with a triumph of US policy.
I dislike both Bush and Blair, but men with world vision do not have to be likeable. For there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.
And without decisive action from outside, Iraq's future would have been bound indefinitely in the bloody shallows and brutal miseries of the Saddam regime, while UN officials lined their pockets and the unspeakable torment of the country deepened.
Thousands have died in the war - but thousands would have died anyway over the same period of time had Saddam remained in power. Moreover, there is now no choice. Forces of immense evil are now at work in Iraq: islamo-fascists, who do not scruple to blow up schoolchildren, the Red Cross or Shia Muslim worshippers on their holiest day at their holiest of shrines, are an enemy that cannot be allowed to triumph. Victory for the forces opposed to the US-led coalition in Iraq would be a world disaster. It's that simple. The US has just got to get on with it.