LONDON -- At first glance, the slightly dated, 30-story United Nations building in New York's Lower East Side looks like misery mansion. Everything seems to be going wrong these days.
Americans have mounted venomous criticisms of beleaguered Secretary General Kofi Annan and the whole organization. The charge sheet starts with a list of alleged failures to take decisive steps in various humanitarian and security crises -- ranging from inaction in the 1994 Rwanda massacres and refusal in 1998 to endorse intervention in Kosovo to, more recently, hesitation over Iraq and the horrors going on in western Sudan.
On top of this has come revelations of poor judgment and improper behavior -- to put it mildly -- over the handling of the oil-for-food arrangements back in the days when Saddam Hussein was still in power and apparently allocating Iraqi oil on the cheap to friends around the world, who then gratefully sold it to others, making a secret killing in profits both for Hussein and themselves. One accusation is that U.N. officials, and one in particular, knew all about this scam and let it roll, or even abetted it. Yet there is another way of looking at all these issues.