Throughout Europe, and to a disturbing extent in this country, the view is heard that whatever the menace Iraq may offer, using force to change the regime is legitimate only if the United Nations lends its moral authority to military action. Yet the United Nations, far from being the locus of moral authority, has become one of the most corrupt and corrupting institutions in the world.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in its conduct toward the state of Israel. Today it seems hard to imagine that the world organization was midwife to the rebirth of the Jewish state. In voting on behalf of a Jewish state, the United Nations was implementing its founding charter, which turned over the responsibility for fulfilling all League of Nations mandates to the new organization -- including the Mandate assigned to Great Britain to create a Jewish national home in Palestine. The nation of Israel is many thousands of years old and the longing of the Jewish people to return to their homeland goes back almost two thousand years. Nonetheless the UN vote was crucial in bestowing international legitimacy on the newly reborn state. The Jews accepted a truncated sausage link of territory, which the United Nations partitioned from the already partitioned 22% of Palestine left after England cut off Transjordan from the Palestine Mandate in 1922.

Ignoring the UN Resolution, neighboring Arab states declared war. This was the first clear violation of UN resolutions by member states, but the UN merely declared an arms embargo, which in effect undercut the fledgling state the UN had voted to establish.

This failure to act must have been deeply disappointing to many of the UN's architects and early activists who had been deeply affected by Nazi bestiality toward the Jews and Western indifference -- people like French humanist Rene Cassin (one of the few deserving recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize), Eleanor Roosevelt, and international lawyer Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term genocide). They had witnessed the political and moral collapse of the League of Nations and sought to avoid repeating the horrors precipitated by the failure of the League.

Deprived of any enforcement mechanism, the League was unable to deal with the great evils that confronted it. It had no answer for Mussolini's intervention in Abyssinia, or for the Nazi-Fascist forces sent to Spain. When Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland, in contravention of Germany's commitments under the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations did nothing. It did nothing, again, about Hitler's demands for the Sudetenland. In the 1930s, and then during World War II, the Jews vainly appealed to the League -- one of whose founding members, France, was even then rounding up Jews for Hitler's camps. The failure of the UN to act on behalf of the infant state it had created, despite its enforcement powers, must have seemed a frightening portent.

Worse would follow. Although Israel's flowering in the decades following 1949 should have been a source of great pride to the UN (which could have glided over its failure to provide support when it was most needed) with hardly a pause, the world organization turned against Israel. In 1948, the UN began what became endless denunciations of Israel for dispossession of Arab "refugees" who fled in the course of the war the Arabs instigated; there was never a word about the 750,000 Jewish refugees -- more than the number of Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel -- thrown out of Arab lands in which they had lived for many centuries.

Jeane Kirkpatrick has said she found the anti-Semitism at the UN during her tenure "unbelievable."

Sometimes these early attacks veered into the ludicrous. For example, in 1949, the UN passed a resolution calling for international supervision of holy sites in Israel and Jerusalem, by now divided between Israel and Jordan. This became the basis for Arab countries to routinely denounce Israel in the General Assembly for such "sins" as power-washing the Church of the Nativity in Nazareth and improving the road to the church, both efforts to restore and beautify the holy site. But no state, apart from Israel, rose to complain about the way in which Jordan was desecrating Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and violating its agreements to keep the city open to people of all faiths. Scores of resolutions would be passed after 1967 denying Israel's right to unify Jerusalem, but no voices within the "world community" would be heard to denounce what Jordan did there.

Since the Six Day War, the UN's attacks on Israel have been unrelenting. U.S. representatives to the UN ranging from Ambassadors Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, to observer William F. Buckley, Jr., have testified to the anti-Israel ferocity that spills over into rampant anti-Semitism in its halls. Indeed, Jeane Kirkpatrick has said she found the anti-Semitism at the UN during her tenure "unbelievable." She says she has

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