It is comic to a degree, this demurring. But when does the primacy Mr. Annan places on public relations begin to give the United States a negative return on its (substantial) investment?

Perhaps it already has, and the Bush administration’s repeated endorsements (or support-by-silence) of the Secretary-General are hardly ameliorative.

So encouraging have those approbations been that Mr. Annan recently conducted “pep talks” for UN personnel to assuage their worries about the American right’s persecution of him. Look a little closer, though, and even UN staffers have their doubts. One revealed that he wants an apology from Annan, but didn’t dare ask. Others criticized the official spin on the latest Volcker release. And in late 2004, UN employees passed a vote of no confidence in “upper management.” Fissures are naturally creeping up the Secretariat. Inside the General Assembly, ardent support is increasingly coming only from the still-warm core of Old Europe. And American journalists, professional and citizen alike, are hungrily following the money in the Oil-for-Food boondoggle. The inertia is plain to see.

It pushes against the Ghanaian who led the United Nations during two momentous episodes. The first is the massive flow of easy money to a brutal dictator, a transfer initiated and underwritten by the United Nations. When figures from all of the disparate companies involved are brought together, it may turn out to be the largest modern financial scandal. The second is the Iraq War, which, by the accounts of even the most obstinate liberal politicos, has borne seed after seed of democratic revolution in parts of the world previously isolated from the sights, sounds, and feelings of freedom.

To observe the effects of the Iraq War in the context of America’s stated national interests is to observe great success. We seek, by our very nature, to project liberal democracy and basic human freedom as far as our voices will carry. The endgame of this enterprise is a world safer for American citizens and more fertile for American business. Already, Iraq has sprouted these fiscal fruits, as have other nations. But Kofi Annan denounced the foreign adventure as “illegal”. His organization, at every step, sought to impede the United States’ action in Iraq. Threat assessments drawn from the intelligence community were not in question, then. The threshold for action was. Though history may end up supporting the “catastrophic success” appellation, the United States now has the opportunity and the responsibility to look at Mr. Annan’s leadership in the run-up to the war. It is at least probable that the Secretary-General’s interest in the threshold question went beyond his formal station. The same is true of Russian, German, and French veto casters.

The Bush Administration’s obligation to investigate Kofi Annan’s dealings extends beyond Paul Volcker’s Independent Inquiry Committee; whose reports, while expansive, have been soft on Mr. Annan, to the point of generating headlines suggesting that he has already been exonerated. Mr. Volcker will also not come out with any evaluation of the effect Saddam Hussein’s undue influence had upon the national security of the United States; particularly its ability to construct a united front. From such an assay important conclusions might be drawn about the susceptibility of the United Nations to hand-binding corruption. Certainly no international body as large as the UN is impermeable. But knowing just how Oil-for-Food affected the calculus of America’s enemies and opposers is an essential step towards the transparency we rightfully demand from the United Nations.