As crises boil around the world, where is Turtle Bay, which grandly considers itself the voice of the “international community”?

• The Security Council is trying to reach a consensus on North Korea, but will probably be divided if any meaningful action is achieved. Separately, Secretary-General Annan still has no envoy to North Korea, following the Canadian tycoon Maurice Strong’s resignation last year after he was suspected of receiving money from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.




• Diplomats see the council’s action on Pyongyang as a blueprint for future decisions on Iran. Separately, Mr. Annan’s special representative for Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, attended a Tehran regional conference over the weekend, discussing things like the “recent atrocities of the Zionist regime,” according to the Tehran Times. Though long-promised, incidentally, Mr. Qazi’s exoneration of unspecified “wrongdoings” has yet to be published by the United Nations.




• The Arab group at Turtle Bay wants the Security Council to follow Geneva’s Human Rights Council by issuing a one-sided condemnation of Israel’s military defense against Palestinian Arab acts of war. Not separating himself from the council, Mr. Annan, who has numerous redundantly placed representatives in Gaza, has challenged American policy by saying he would “urge the Security Council to take a clear position on the situation” in Gaza.




• Human rights violations and atrocities in Sudan, Congo, Burma, Tibet, and other spots remain poorly attended to by both the security and the human rights councils.

Let’s take a closer look.

Under American and Japanese pressure, on Friday a resolution proposal on North Korea was officially presented to the 15 members of the Security Council that demanded an end to missile tests and banned international trade on anything connected to Kim Jong Il’s missile program.

Just like the missile tests, Tehran’s experimentation with uranium enrichment may violate signed agreements but is currently legal under international law. Passing actionable council resolutions would make both the North Korean testing and Iranian enrichment illegal, and therefore subject to sanctions and other punitive measures.

China and Russia have signaled that they would oppose the North Korea resolution this week. American officials say they would love council unity, but would consider non-veto abstentions by Moscow and Beijing, the two renegade permanent council members, a victory. European diplomats tell me, however, that a divided council would bode ill for future negotiations on Iran. Also, while Pyongyang’s sugar daddy, China, rarely uses its veto power, Russia might be less restrained on Iran.

Mr. Annan, meanwhile, last week traveled in Africa and Europe, expounding on his newly discovered soccer fandom, calling Ghana’s players “my boys,” and issuing an occasional statement on world affairs.

While the South Korean influence peddler Tongsun Park is on trial in Lower Manhattan for serving as Iraq’s unregistered agent, his top contact to Mr. Annan’s United Nations, the one-time Turtle Bay “reform” tsar Mr. Strong, is currently at a safe distance in Beijing. There he advises the communist government on his favorite topics, energy and the environment. Meanwhile, no one at the United Nations is attending to Pyongyang’s energy needs, which Mr. Strong — when he was Mr. Annan’s envoy to North Korea — maintained would solve the peninsula’s problems.

For several months now, the U.N. internal probing arm, OIOS, has been investigating Mr. Qazi, Mr. Annan’s Iraq envoy, after allegations of unspecified “wrongdoings” were made against him. Although Mr. Annan’s spokesmen have promised that Mr. Qazi, a Pakistani, would be cleared, the OIOS has declined to publicly issue the exoneration.

Despite that — not to mention several unresolved problems in Iraq — Mr. Qazi was quoted by the Iranian news agency IRNA as saying that among other “problems of Islamic states,” the “recent developments in Palestine” would be discussed at a meeting of Arab and Muslims foreign ministers in Tehran that he attended over the weekend.

Ah, Palestine: There’s an easy issue to agree on. With an easily assembled majority at the United Nations’ newly created Human Rights Council, the Arab countries passed two resolutions on Israel last week while the Geneva-based council glossed over human rights violations anywhere else around the globe.

But the Arab countries’ hopes of getting a similar resolution passed at the Security Council flagged as Turtle Bay diplomats, aware of past American vetoes, demanded a more balanced approach. As the Arabs struggled to comprehend any justification for Israel’s defensive actions, Mr. Annan dropped his soccer commentary for the moment, and on Friday demanded council action.

Isn’t it time, then, for the Bush administration to return to the “coalition of the willing” as its preferred mode of multilateral diplomacy?