One of the small, ugly ironies of all this haggling at the UN is this line of reasoning that the UN’s credibility and future are on the line in all this. To a significant degree, I think this is true: The Security Council said Saddam had to disarm. Now they really need to make sure he does. But the people in the administration who are pressing this argument about the UN’s credibility are also people who have more or less unconcealed contempt for the institution in the first place and would probably just as soon see it trashed anyway. As John Judis notes, they haven’t worked with the UN. They’ve bullied it.
