UNSCAM, the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, may turn out to be the single biggest financial scandal in the history of mankind, not that you’d know it given the scant media coverage.

Nevertheless, the story continues to develop thanks in large part to the efforts of investigative journalist Claudia Rosett. In today’s Wall Street Journal, she reports that the stonewalling of the investigation goes right to the top of the U.N.:

[I]n the interval between March 19, when Mr. Annan finally conceded in the face of overwhelming evidence that the program might after all need investigating by independent experts, and April 21, when former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker was appointed to head to the investigation, Mr. Annan’s office explicitly reminded these two crucial contractors, which worked for the Secretariat’s Oil for Food program checking the imports and exports involved in more than $100 billion worth of Saddam’s oil sales and relief imports, to keep quiet.

Even before this scandal erupted, I had serious doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. Its problems are structural, and this scandal is yet another sign of how deep the rot goes.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, John O’Sullivan argues that the scandal has robbed the U.N. of its pretense of legitimacy:

More worrying is what the Oil for Food scandal tells us about the political attitudes of the U.N. bureaucracy and the political elites of Europe. None of them was seriously hostile to Saddam or his brutal state — they struck attitudes in public that their private actions belied. None of them was even slightly concerned about the Iraqi people despite their crocodile tears about the impact of sanctions — they colluded in denying the promised humanitarian aid to them. None wanted to see U.N. resolutions enforced despite their sanctimonious rhetoric about the U.N. being the fount of legitimacy. All of them were mainly concerned with obstructing the Anglo-Americans in their campaign to enforce those resolutions and oust Saddam.

The corruption of the Oil-for-Food program may turn out to be the primary reason the U.S. faced such stiff opposition among the larger players in the U.N. If so, the corruption is also one of the reasons why we aren’t getting more international help in Iraq today. In other words, there is a very real possibility that the U.N. scam led to more American casualties in Iraq than would have occurred if other governments were more generous in augmenting the coalition’s troop strength. Historically, the U.N. has done little to fulfill the goals outlined in its own charter. And now we know that the U.N. is a fraud on other levels as well.

The U.N. occupies extremely valuable land in Manhattan. Americans could do more with that land than the back-stabbing diplomats who take our money to run the U.N. and then use it to prop up Saddam Hussein. If you ask me, we’d all be better off if the U.N. headquarters were moved to Brussels, where the organization could be even more attentive to its European masters.