The brief meeting in the Oval Office just about summed up the failings of Kofi Annan’s tenure as secretary general of the United Nations. With President Bush sitting there next to him, Mr. Annan on Monday managed essentially to contradict the joint Israeli-American position on the terrorist group Hamas. The secretary general expressed the idea that “there is an opportunity here for Hamas to transform itself into a political party and work with the international community and the Israeli government.” This as the Hamas Web site, according to Palestinian Media Watch, offered up two videos, one promising to drink the Jews’ blood until they leave the “Muslim countries,” the other of a mother dressing her son for a mission as a suicide bomber.

On his way out of the White House, Mr. Annan was asked about a new U.N. report sharply critical of conditions for terrorists detained by America at Guantanamo Bay. It emerged yesterday at briefings by the State and Defense departments that, as State Department spokesman Sean McCormack put it in a dispatch distributed by the Pentagon, “nobody who wrote this report actually went to Guantanamo.”

While Mr. Annan was meeting with Mr. Bush, the U.N.-managed elections in Haiti were turning into a debacle, with the leading candidate, Rene Preval, being ferried around the country in a U.N. helicopter while denouncing fraud and mismanagement in the U.N.-managed elections. There were reports of U.N. “peacekeeping” troops opening fire on Haitian mobs, and the hotel being used by the U.N. as an election staging ground was stormed by gangs. It was enough to make one wish that there were American G.I.’s maintaining order in Haiti rather than a bunch of blue helmets worn by soldiers from countries unfamiliar with free elections.

The issue of Iran came up in Mr. Annan’s meeting with Mr. Bush and the secretary-general’s advice was to try to continue to negotiate with the Holocaust denying, terrorist-supporting regime in Iran that is repressing its own people yet that remains a member in good standing at the United Nations.

It’s enough to make clear – even apart from Mr. Annan’s scandalous oversight of the oil-for-food program in Iraq and his denunciation of the liberation of the Iraqi people – that this secretary general has only further eroded the already questionable credibility of the United Nations. There are those who no doubt hope that his successor will be an improvement. But by our lights the U.N. won’t improve so long as its member states include terror sponsors and unfree, non-democratic countries.