The burgeoning scandal at the United Nations over its oil-for-food program has reached the point where the honorable thing for the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is to resign so that a new leader can open this matter to the public. This has come into focus suddenly this week with Mr. Annan’s stonewalling of an investigation into the oil-for-food program under way in the American Congress, which now estimates that through the U.N. scheme the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein, enriched himself and his henchmen at home and abroad to the tune of $21.3 billion, $17.3 billion of which occurred on Mr. Annan’s watch. If this occurred on the watch of a chief executive of a corporation, as, say, at Enron, the game would have been over months ago. At some point, the only way for Mr. Annan to assert his credibility is to step aside, and in our view that point is past.

To see his failure in full it pays to step back all the way to the early years of his tenure as secretary-general, when the United Nations Special Commission was set up to oversee the disarming of Iraq. With hindsight it is clear that Mr. Annan from the start undercut the Australian head of the commission, Ambassador Butler, for asking too many pesky questions about Saddam’s weapons, treating Baathist “complaints” about the inspectors’ work as on a par with the worries of his own team. He consequently agreed to the Iraqis’ request to have regime officials accompany U.N. inspectors to “presidential palaces” where key materials were held. Mr. Annan then effectively removed Mr. Butler from office and replaced him with Hans Blix, the Swede who had given the regime a nuclear clean bill of health in the 1980s.

Indeed, when Saddam suspended UNSCOM inspections in 1998, Mr. Annan could have declared him in breach of Security Council Resolution 687, which ended the first Gulf War.

Instead, in what can be seen only as a colossal error of judgment, Mr. Annan proceeded to double the oil for food program that was predicated upon adherence to the inspections regime. It was on a par with his failure as under-secretary general for peacekeeping, when he failed to act with dispatch upon receipt of urgent cable from a U.N. general warning of the impending slaughter in Rwanda. After the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis, Mr. Annan later acknowledged “an institutional ideology of impartiality when confronted with attempted genocide.”

In a new study of the United Nations called “Tower of Babble,” Israel’s former envoy, Dore Gold, reckons such “moral equilateralism” is even more pronounced in the U.N.’s approach to terrorism. It treats the legitimate self-defense of democratic states as on a par with, if not worse than, suicide bombing, as exemplified by the U.N. Secretariat’s submission to the International Court of Justice’s investigation of the Israeli security fence. Just as the General Assembly feted Yasser Arafat in 1974 without making any demands that he abandon violence, Mr. Annan in 2000 threw his arms round Sheikh Nasrallah of Hezbollah. And the U.N.’s internal investigation of the oil-for-food program is positively Giuliani-esque compared to its militant unwillingness to investigate the use of UNRWA camps as bases for Palestinian terrorism.

It is true that Mr. Annan has an investigation under way that is headed by the inestimable Paul Volcker, who has enormous credibility and whose signature on any final report will be dispositive for many of us. Were Mr. Annan playing a useful role – helping, say, marshal support for the war against Islamic terrorism – there might be some sense in him sticking to his post through the investigations under way at Turtle Bay and in Washington. But Mr. Annan has cast himself against America in the war in Iraq. He is now stonewalling a Congressional investigation in a way far more brazen than anything attempted by Presidents Nixon or Clinton.

So it is hard to see why Mr. Annan needs to remain at the United Nations during Mr. Volcker’s work. It may be that he will be vindicated in respect of his own financial dealings. But it is hard to see how he can better assist in the investigations under way now than by stepping out of the way so that a reform secretary can be installed in his place.