With Senator Kerry on the campaign trail arguing for a bigger United Nations role in Iraq, and with violence claiming more American lives in Iraq every week, one can understand why White House political officials might be attracted to the idea of passing the Iraq buck to the United Nations. It’d be harder for Democrats to criticize President Bush for fouling up Iraq if Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy were the same as Mr. Kerry’s.

Mr. Kerry wrote in an April 13 article in The Washington Post, “The administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq’s transition to a new constitution and government.”Mr. Bush said at a press conference that night, “We’re working closely with the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, and with Iraqis to determine the exact form of the government that will receive sovereignty on June 30th.”

But before Mr. Bush goes rushing off on Mr. Kerry’s priority of giving the U.N. a more prominent role in Iraq, it’d be worth his time to read an article in this month’s number of Commentary magazine. The article,”The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?” is by the veteran foreign correspondent and economics writer of the Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett. It’s an amazing thing that, with all the newspapers in the country covering a presidential campaign in which Iraq and the United Nations are issues, it took a small magazine issued by the American Jewish Committee to put into perspective a scandal that makes Enron look like tiddly winks. But there you have it, one of the miracles of the marketplace.

Though the Oil-for-Food program was designed as a humanitarian relief program, a way, as Ms. Rosett puts it,”to feed hungry children in a far-off land until the world had settled its quarrels with Saddam Hussein,” it turns out to have been a vast scandal. It involved, Ms. Rosett reports, “bribes, kickbacks, fraud, smuggling, stories of graft involving tens of billions of dollars and countless barrels of oil and implicating big business and high officials in dozens of countries; allegations that the head of the program himself was on the take.” Now the Congress and an independent panel are investigating, with many people wanting to know about the role of the secretary-general of the U.N., Kofi Annan, himself, though Ms. Rosett quotes the Nobel laureate as saying,”I don’t think we need to have our reputation impugned.”

According to the Commentary article, Mr. Annan “approved the use of $20 million in Oil-for-Food funds to pay for an ‘Olympic sport city,'” at a time when sports were “the favorite arena of Saddam’s sadistic son Uday, already infamous for torturing Iraqi athletes.” Also approved by Mr. Annan: “$50 million to equip Saddam’s propaganda arm, the Ministry of Information.”Among the other dubious items paid for with Oil-for-Food money were “Mercedes-Benz touring sedans,” according to the article.

Iraqis are all too intimately familiar with these abuses, which is why they are wary of U.N. involvement. Given the U.N.’s record in Iraq so far, there’s every reason to indicate that it would foul things up there even worse than the Bush administration.

If Mr. Bush genuinely believes, as he said yesterday, that “freedom in the heart of the Middle East is an historic opportunity to change the world,” it’s a puzzlement to us why he’d entrust that historic responsibility to a U.N. leadership that collaborated with Saddam on the Oil-for-Food program and that defaulted when it came time to oust the dictator.

Certainly it’s not the way toward freedom in Iraq. And if Mr. Bush is seeking political advantage, one way to achieve it would be to ask Mr. Kerry why the body that was buying Mercedes sedans for Iraq’s butcherous regime deserves to be a “full partner” in rebuilding it as a free democracy.