Kofi Annan is greeting the new year with some new staff, and none too soon. As Benny Avni reported on our front page yesterday, there is a dramatic turnover under way in the inner circle of the United Nations secretary-general. Mr.Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, is out. An undersecretary-general, Catherine Bertini, will leave in March, as will the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, Peter Hansen.

Unlike the reshuffling of President Bush’s Cabinet, which leaves many key players in place and happened in the context of an election victory, the changes at Turtle Bay take place in the context of demands by senators and congressmen for Mr. Annan’s own resignation. They take place at a U.N. whose peacekeeping forces are credibly accused of raping children in Congo, and at a U.N. under whose nose Saddam Hussein swindled billions of dollars from the oil-for-food program in Iraq.

The departures of Messrs. Riza and Hansen are positive developments. Mr. Riza, a Pakistani, is widely thought to have been the second most powerful figure at Turtle Bay – and one particularly hostile to American and Israeli interests. It is said that for months one Israeli diplomat attempted, each time he passed Mr. Riza’s office, to say a good morning hello to Mr. Annan’s chief deputy, only to be met with a stony silence, though Mr. Riza would gladly return the greetings of others. It is said that Mr. Riza bypassed the U.N. legal department to slip anti-Israel language in one of the secretary-general’s speeches.

Mr. Riza did great damage not only to American and Israeli interests but also, on the rebound, to Mr. Annan’s credibility. It speaks volumes about Mr. Annan that he allowed Mr. Riza to hold a seat of power as long as he did. In his position at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, Mr. Hansen, while holding an office that has the potential to play a constructive role in the Middle East, also earned a reputation as particularly hostile to Israel.

It is widely noted around the U.N. that the ouster of Mr. Riza followed Mr. Annan’s visit to Washington, where he met with Secretary Powell and Secretary-designate Rice. The speculation is that Mr. Annan was given an indication of the kinds of things that he had to do to hang on to his job and that Mr. Riza balked. No doubt the accuracy of this line of speculation will be confirmed, or not, in due course.

The test for Mr.Annan, however, will be in who is brought in now to take over these portfolios. If the new officials are as anti-American and anti-Israeli as the old ones, the changes will be merely cosmetic. And there are plenty of additional personnel changes that could stand to be made, starting with Lakhdar Brahimi, who, along with Messrs. Riza and Hansen, has been known as one of the three most hostile senior figures to Israel.

When it all comes down to it, though, the problems of the U.N. go beyond personnel and beyond its treatment of Israel, symbolic though the Jewish State may be. The U.N.’s problems are structural. Any body in which terrorist-sponsoring states such as Syria and Iran hold full voting memberships, as do non-democratic, unfree states such as North Korea and Communist China, is inherently flawed. It lacks the credibility and the will to carry out the most urgent tasks, which are fighting extremist Islamic terrorism and spreading freedom and democracy. The thought that the U.N. is insurmountably tainted by having terror-sponsoring or unfree members seems radical to the striped-pants set, but it is common sense to the ordinary Americans whose taxes pay for the U.N.

There’s a view around town that the Bush administration actually wants to keep Mr. Annan in place in part because a weak or discredited U.N. is a convenient excuse for American unilateralism. Were the U.N. actually well-run and its leader well-respected, this argument goes, it would be more difficult for the Bush administration to take actions that the world body does not support. In this view, it is the advocates of multilateralism who actually should be the ones leading the charge for Mr. Annan’s ouster, for until he leaves, the U.N. won’t really be taken seriously by the American people.

Despite its internal logic, that argument strikes us as overly cynical and, again, too personal. Were a new secretary general to defend keeping Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Red China as members in good standing, he or she won’t amount to an improvement that matters a great deal in terms of the credibility of the U.N.

Mr. Annan, as part of his effort to save his job, is now plumping for a special emergency session on January 24 in honor of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. It’s a touching gesture, but it involves crimes committed before the U.N. was established. If Mr. Annan wants to build credibility with Americans and Israelis, let him throw himself into the struggle to win global recognition for a unified Jerusalem under Israel’s sovereignty as capital of the Jewish State and let him place the credibility of his office on the side of Israel and America as they seek to win the war that has been launched against them by Islamic and Arab terror.

As it now stands, an emergency session on January 24 will serve primarily as a reminder that the prior attempt at world government, the League of Nations, collapsed in its failure to be of use in preventing the Nazi onslaught that led to World War II. Today the U.N. is on the verge of a similar collapse because of its failings in the current war. It is time to start moving beyond personnel changes to organizing something better to replace it.