The corruption that turns out to have surrounded the United Nations “oil for food” program in Iraq now turns out to have been so vast that even Kofi Annan himself and the New York Times have been forced to acknowledge it.

But all the documents emerging and details of the way that the billions of dollars were used by Saddam Hussein to curry favor around the world are of more than merely historical interest. After all, anyone seriously following the matter already knew that Saddam was corrupt and that plenty of oil for food money was ending up in the pockets of those other than the hungry children of Iraq.

The real question is whether the lessons of the oil for food program are going to be applied in the months and years ahead in cases like Iran and North Korea, where the liberal think-tankers and Democratic senators and presidential candidates are calling for solutions along similar lines to the tactics that failed in Iraq. There are plenty of other reasons to oppose such schemes to buy off dictators building nuclear weapons.

It’s morally dubious, and it encourages other such dictators to try the same gambit in hopes of being bought off. But surely one practical reason is that illuminated by the story of Saddam’s billions.

No dictator with no amount of monitoring can be trusted to channel food or other financial aid to the truly needy.

If, after the Iraqi experience, American policymakers seriously consider paying off the likes of Kim Jong Il and Ayatollah Khamenei, that’d be the real scandal. It’d result in more stories about misappropriated funds when those regimes are eventually toppled. The time to prevent it is now before the deals are done.