One of the biggest losers in the November 2 election was a man who didn’t – and couldn’t – cast a ballot but who nonetheless tried to affect the outcome: Kofi Annan.

In a transparent attempt to lend weight to the Kerry campaign’s criticism of Bush administration policies in Iraq, the United Nations’ secretary-general denounced the war several weeks before the American election as “illegal.” It was a direct slap to an incumbent president – and all the more outrageous because no such judgment was pronounced on Bill Clinton’s war in Kosovo, which also lacked U.N. sanction.

And given the fact that Mr. Annan is now presiding over a monumental scandal involving the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq, he’s poorly positioned to prate about legality. If the oil-for-food scandal turns out to be half as bad as now suspected – a $21 billion rip-off, according to the latest congressional estimate – it will place a huge cloud over the U.N.’s claim that it acts as the world’s moral arbiter.

Of course, the problem with the U.N. goes far deeper than Mr. Annan’s questionable leadership. Mr. Annan, who has spent virtually his entire career as a U.N. bureaucrat, last year appointed a group of elderly statesmen to assess possible reforms in a world much changed since 1945, when the U.N. came into existence. Their report is due in several months. But even that isn’t likely to get at the more fundamental question of why the U.N. should be considered much more than an occasionally convenient place for diplomats to jaw about things.

The U.N., and before it the ill-fated League of Nations, were predicated on the belief that the chief threat to peace and human decency was nationalism. What was needed, it was thought, was a collective counterbalance to the nation-state, a transnational agency that would uphold ideals of freedom, peace and prosperity against future Hitlers and Tojos.

But this ignored some harsh realities. For one thing, very few of the member states – now numbering 191 – would have recognized freedom if they had stumbled across it. Most are dictatorships or squalid, dysfunctional principalities and kleptocracies with little interest in real human rights. The all-important Security Council might include France, England and America, but it also included the Soviet Union, which was actively committed to imposing communism on as much of the world as possible.

Just how absurd the U.N. has become is highlighted by the fact that none other than Libya recently served as head of its Human Rights Commission – and America’s seat on the commission was handed over to that garden-spot of individual liberty, Syria. And while nationalism certainly has a dark side, what reason is there to think that a world government of some sort would be any better? As the oil-for-food swindle makes abundantly clear, the politics of the U.N. is pretty much like politics everywhere: a mix of high hopes (feed the Iraqi people), low motives (award the lucrative contracts for oil to our French and Russian friends) and a self-interested bureaucracy (cover up the crime).

The fact that the world is divided up into nation states has distinct benefits, not least that they allow for social, political and economic experimentation. As Cornell University political scientist Jeremy Rabkin has pointed out, national sovereignty offers the oppressed at least the possibility of refuge. When things get too bad in one country, people can at least try to flee to some other country. If the U.N., by contrast, were sovereign, there would be nowhere else to go.

Well, you say, nobody thinks the U.N. is going to become a world government anytime soon. But don’t be too sure. The proposed international criminal court would give judges appointed by the U.N. the right to judge individual citizens of nation-states, unlike the so-called World Court in the Hague, which arbitrates differences among states. The U.N.-backed global warming treaty, meanwhile, in effect would put the world’s energy supply in the hands of a bunch of bureaucrats appointed by god-knows-who.

It’s no accident that Mr. Annan placed his bet on John Kerry, who has long been an ardent backer of the idea that nation states should give way to international organizations. But Mr. Annan lost that bet, and the time is long past for a serious clipping of the U.N.’s wings – starting at the top. And once a replacement for Mr. Annan is named, the next step should be to find a replacement for France as a permanent member of the Security Council.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.