"Only yesterday the German daily, Die Welt, reported that Syria, in coordination with Khartoum, used chemical weapons against civilians in Darfur."

    The leaked ICRC documents themselves reveal interpretations of the laws of war so contrary to what the Geneva Convention actually say that it's hard to read them as other than products of anti-American animus.
 
    By demanding POW status for un-uniformed combatants who target civilians -- in contravention of the plain language of the Geneva Convention.

   There was that splendidly legitimate U.N. operation in Bosnia, where its blue-helmeted peacekeepers watched with indifference as Serbian soldiers rounded up for slaughter thousands of Muslim men in the so-called U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. Or Rwanda in 1994, where Mr. Annan -- then head of the U.N. peacekeeping office -- shrugged off panicked warning calls from the U.N. commander on the ground, thereby allowing the slaughter of 800,000.

   The Secretary-General's latest posturing is far from harmless. The U.N. has been given the lead role in organizing the elections in Iraq scheduled for January. But Mr. Annan's "illegal" comments, which have been replayed across the Arab world, have given an added feeling of legitimacy to every jihadist hoping to disrupt the vote.

"I do not recall any vote in the Security Council, ...that we had been behaving illegally in Iraq. Nor does Mr. Annan mention any U.N. vote, or any other authority, for his statement to the BBC that, from the "from our point of view and from the [U.N.] Charter point of view, [U.S. action] was illegal."

    The Taliban and Saddam Hussein were once the United Nations' twin embarrassments, rogue regimes that thumbed their noses at weak U.N. protestations, slaughtered their own, invaded their neighbors, and turned their outlands into terrorists sanctuaries. Now they are gone, despite either U.N. indifference or veritable opposition to their removal.
 
    First, the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization, the old perpetual force for good that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes.

    Second, urging democratic reforms in Palestine, is antithetical to the very stuff of the U.N., an embarrassing reminder that nearly half of its resolutions in the past half-century have been aimed at punishing tiny democratic Israel at the behest of its larger, more populous-and dictatorial-Arab neighbors.
 
    Third, the present secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is himself a symbol of all that is wrong with the U.N. A multibillion dollar oil-for-food fraud, replete with kickbacks (perhaps involving a company that his own son worked for), grew unchecked on his watch.

    It was planned by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939 when they signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact dividing eastern Europe between them.
 
    The Soviets remained a loyal ally of Nazi Germany. They supplied the economic sinews of war to Hitler for almost two years.

    The leaders of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have called on Putin to denounce a 1939 German-Soviet pact.
 
     Putin spoke vehemently in opposition to the idea that Moscow should apologize.

    President Vladimir Putin's government increasingly deviates from the democratic achievements of the 1990s in favor of greater re-centralization of politics and economy.
 
    The Kremlin seeks to subjugate and control many formerly independent institutions, including television and the legislative and judiciary branches of the government.
 
    The Kremlin renationalized Russia's main independent television network, NTV. Then the Kremlin sent a chilling message to political opponents and to free markets: It blatantly violated judicial independence and legal procedures in its case against Russia's largest private company, the oil-producing giant Yukos, and its founder and principal owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
 
    Perhaps the most damaging move in the long run is Putin's plan -- passed by the docile legislature in December -- to cancel the election of regional governors.

    Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That's how suicide bombers are made.
 
    The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards. Just to restore some proper perspective, let me quote a snippet from a sermon delivered by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, which ran last weekend on the Palestinian Authority's official TV station:
 
    ''The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world -- except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquillity under our rule because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews -- even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.''

    Bribery is certainly not new to Russia, but according to several recent surveys and interviews with dozens of Russians, it has surged in scale and scope in recent years under the presidency of Vladimir V. Putin, so that today it touches just about every aspect of life.
 
    The government has become so ensnared by corruption that it threatens to undo Russia's progress since the dismantling of the Soviet Union 14 years ago.
 
    The Indem Foundation, a research group in Moscow that has conducted the most extensive efforts to measure bribery here, estimated last month that Russians paid more than $3 billion in bribes annually and that businesses paid $316 billion.
 
    "The weakness, inefficiency and corruption of all branches of government are the most important obstacles to further progress in reforming Russia," the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., said in June in a report commissioned by the Russian government.

    Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 -- 315 in all.
 
    What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.
 
    Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks -- 301 of the 315 in the period I studied -- took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective, seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.

    Saddam's Iraq, al-Qaida and other states and terrorist groups were and are linked by their common enemy and their common goal: They want the United States destroyed.
 
    That there were links was confirmed by 9-11 commission Vice Chairman Thomas Kean, who said: "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there."
 
    Indeed there were. For example, Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al-Qaida cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, found safe haven in Iraq and documents recently found in Tikrit indicate Saddam provided Yasin with both a home and a salary.

    The president did not order the liberation of Iraq in retaliation for 9-11, but to help prevent future 9-11s by removing a breeding ground for and a state sponsor of terror and a gathering threat to U.S. security. Both America and the world are safer as a result.

    However, Olusegun Obasanjo, president of Nigeria and the African Union's current chairman, said in London yesterday he would "not be part" of any public condemnation of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president.

    Most African countries have been atrociously governed in the past half-century. A lack of institutional checks has allowed an array of incompetent strongmen to rule as they pleased until the money ran out, at which point northern donors often tossed them an extra bundle of cash.
 
    Mr. Meredith tells similar stories about Idi Amin of Uganda, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, the Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa, who liked feeding people to his pet crocodiles, and many more. Dramatic as these tyrants' tales may be, they are less revealing than Mr. Meredith's sober demolition of some of Africa's heroes.
 
    Mr. Meredith's critics will accuse him of cultural insensitivity. By knocking down Africa's heroes, he is denying Africans the right to be proud of their own heritage. This is piffle. If Africa is to prosper, the first step is for Africans to understand what has gone wrong in the past. And as Mr. Meredith's book so convincingly shows, it is bad leadership, first and foremost, that has held the continent back.