The photos coming over the wire yesterday of Fidel Castro welcoming the United Nations to Havana were enough to make us long for Jesse Helms, or maybe even Madeleine Albright. The communist dictator yesterday was welcoming more than 3,000 visitors to Cuba for a conference of the parties to the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification. The United Nations, of course, has perfectly decent meeting facilities available in New York and Geneva. But the world organization, which subsists to a large degree on American taxpayer funding, decided to hold its conference in Havana and give the Cuban economy a boost, even after Mr. Castro’s latest brutal crackdown on advocates of freedom and democracy.

The Associated Press quoted the executive secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, Hama Arba Diallo, as saying, “We all acknowledge the crucial role that Cuba always has played” in fighting the problem. Mr. Diallo said,”I hope delegates will use their stay in Havana as a chance to see for themselves what has been achieved in this country.”

Were some congressional Republicans to hold a hearing to vent their outrage at this turn of events, they’d have to call them selves as witnesses. That’s because it was in 2000 — when the Republicans held a 55 to 45 majority in the Senate — that the Senate ratified the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification. That ratification lends America’s good name to the shenanigans under way at Havana. With Senators Lugar, Hagel, and Biden holding sway on the Senate For eign Relations Committee, United Nations mischief on Cuba has a way of getting farther along than it did back in Senator Helms’s era.

The Havana Republicans and their ally at the State Department, Richard Armitage, have lately been speaking of increasing the U.N. role in post-war Iraq. Fidel Castro mounted the U.N. podium yesterday in Havana. Syria was president of the U.N. Security Council for the month of August. And commencing at U.N. headquarters in New York on Thursday will be a “United Nations Conference of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People,” which has as its official theme “End the Occupation!”and which the Anti-Defamation League is warning will have a “primarily anti-Israel political agenda.” All this is, for anyone who wishes Iraq well, more than enough to cast doubt on the wisdom of increasing the role there of the United Nations.