“It will be a challenging final two years, but I don’t think he reads The New York Sun,” Kofi Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard said last week of his beleaguered boss, testily reacting to a Sun editorial calling on him to step aside.

As hard as the secretary-general’s top lieutenants tried last year to dismiss early reporting on corruption in the oil-for-food program, today that scandal is most likely the one thing your local dry cleaner knows about the United Nations.

When asked last winter about allegations published by Al Mada, a small newspaper jockeying for position in the recently liberated Iraq, U.N. higher-ups pointed to their presumed source. “Everybody knows Ahmed Chalabi is behind this. He hates us,” they said. When further details made their way to American front and editorial pages, the response was either in the vein of “It’s the right-wing press” (translation: ideological attack dogs), or “This one came from left field” (unworthy crackpots).

However slowly, oil-for-food worked its way into the kind of press even the U.N. considers “legitimate.” Mr. Annan instructed his in-house investigative arm, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, OIOS, to look into it and urged reporters to remember all the good the program did for suffering Iraqis.

The scandal, meanwhile, moved from the press to other realms, including Congress, which is responsible for nearly a quarter of the U.N.’s budget. In May, two Republican House members, Scott Garrett of New Jersey, and Jeff Flake of Arizona, introduced the U.N. Oil-for-Food Accountability Act, which threatened to cut some American contributions unless the U.N. cooperates with congressional investigations.

The reaction from the U.N. brass was familiar: These congressmen are right-wingers shooting their mouths off. However, as the investigation was transferred from the U.N.’s own OIOS to Paul Volcker – who quickly adopted the native circle-the-wagons mentality – the threats from Washington also became harder to dismiss. Last week the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Henry Hyde, introduced a bill calling for pressure on the U.N. to release internal records from the initial OIOS investigation. One of the most avid U.N. supporters in Washington, the Democrat Tom Lantos, co-sponsored that bill.

By now, however, the U.N. brass was busy dismissing another brewing scandal concerning said investigative arm, OIOS, and its chief, Dileep Nair, who had been accused by some underlings of abusing his powerful post.

In April, the U.N. staff union demanded a probe into those accusations. Promising a “quick investigation,” Mr. Annan’s answer finally arrived, half a year later, last week: total exoneration of Mr. Nair after what was described as a “thorough” investigation – even though at no point union representatives were even informed of it, let alone asked to participate in it.

Union members were up in arms, with some (evidently coming from left field, as there are no right-wingers at the U.N.) demanding an unprecedented motion declaring “no confidence” in Mr. Annan.

They ended up merely expressing “dissatisfaction” with the investigation but clearly, suspicions of management stonewalling remained high. “No senior official will ever be held accountable under Mr. Annan’s administration,” one exasperated union leader told me. Mr. Annan, meanwhile, was far away last week, taking the council’s bully pulpit to Nairobi, Kenya, in an attempt to pressure Sudan while the Darfur carnage continues.

The high-profile council meeting’s paltry results – a vague promise of a peace treaty and a resolution that all but erased the threat of sanctions against Khartoum – showed the limitations of traditional U.N.-style diplomacy, which Mr. Annan always argues is the only source of international legitimacy.

In the last few months, Mr. Annan and his top brass have nevertheless grown even more confident of their ways. They patiently hear out every unseemly regime on earth because that’s what realistic diplomacy is all about, but remain deaf to America’s freedom and democracy hawks, dismissing them as dangerous and delusional right-wingers.

Mr. Annan famously turned all this into a presidential bet, publicly and unnecessarily expressing anti-Bush opinions on the eve of the election. If he wants his final two years as secretary-general to be less “challenging,” he now needs to reverse some aftereffects of betting on a losing horse.

Mr. Avni covers the United Nations for The New York Sun.