When the journal Commentary arrives in the mail, we usually drop everything else to spend several hours reading it. In the May number, the leading article is by Victor Davis Hanson and runs under the headline, “The Bush Doctrine’s Next Test.” It spoke of the need for American leadership in introducing freedom and democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

“Such an effort would have to be spearheaded by the U.S., but it could be supplemented by the ‘soft power’ of the EU and the UN,” writes Mr. Hanson. “True, the latter has devolved in the last 30 years into a corrupt organization whose writ around the globe is only as strong as the links binding the petty dictators gathered in the General Assembly. But both bodies can impart a certain legitimacy to events already in play.” We confess this brought us up short.

The idea that the petty dictators gathered at the U.N. “can impart a certain legitimacy” has a pedigree. We recall that the argument was made by the U.N.’s secretary-general himself, Kofi Annan, in a February 22 article in the Wall Street Journal. Of the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, he wrote, “Last year, when the Coalition wanted to transfer power to an interim Iraqi government, they turned again to the U.N. for help. They knew that if the U.N. were involved in choosing it, the new government would have a much better chance of being accepted as legitimate and sovereign.”

Mr. Annan went on to give another example, that of organizing the Iraqi elections. “We had the necessary expertise,” he wrote. “But even more important was the legitimacy that our involvement brought.”

What’s going on here might be described as a vicious cycle of legitimacy. The Bush administration and conservatives such as Mr. Hanson believe that the United Nations can lend legitimacy, so they turn to the U.N. for help. Then when the U.N. falls under attack, its defenders, like Mr. Annan, argue that the U.N. can’t be that bad, because even the Bush administration turns to it when it needs legitimacy.

Well, it strikes us as long past time to stop the cycle. Regular readers of Commentary know from articles by authors such as Arthur Waldron and Richard Pipes to be skeptical of both Communist China and newly unfree Russia. Yet both powers sit with a veto on the Security Council. Terrorist Iran, genocidal Sudan, and totalitarian North Korea all have voting privileges and membership in the General Assembly, but free Taiwan is left out.

Any “legitimacy” that inheres in the U.N. – and we don’t think there’s much left – derives from the degree to which free democracies like America keep playing along. The longer America does, the longer the myth of the U.N.’s “legitimacy” survives. And all that myth does is hamper the efforts – flagged in an important statement issued by the Wall Street Journal yesterday – to replace the U.N. with a community of democracies of the sort that Secretary of State Rice is attending this week in Santiago.