Iraq is hardly being returned to Saddam Hussein. He will be tried, and I should think, executed in due course. But the country IS now being returned to the cesspool of Middle East politics. The Bush administration, and more largely, the United States whose interests it represents, cannot afford to govern Iraq indefinitely. Nor are they capable, as the White House has begun to realize, of imposing a democratic order on Iraqi society, as an earlier America imposed democracy on Germany and Japan after World War II. Iraq was not defeated in war; only its hideous tyrant removed, and a very cursory effort made at de-Ba'athification. The Iraqi people must finally find their own way to grace.

Nevertheless, if any of them believed President Bush's fond promise to bring democracy, through Iraq, to the entire Middle East, they have already been betrayed. (I doubt, however, that many believed the rhetoric.) This is because the transition to "democracy" is now being brokered not by Paul Bremer and the U.S., but by Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat, and the United Nations.

As we know from Rwanda, Bosnia, and a dozen other political settlements it has brokered, the U.N. is incapable of facilitating anything except the odd vast massacre. It is an organization corrupt to its core, without power except for what its members agree to provide for it, and therefore under the direction of a kind of rotating conspiracy of the world's most cynical and posturing politicians...

Mr. Brahimi is among the smoothest of them. As the envoy of the Arab League in October 1989, he conned the Lebanese Christian prime minister, Michel Aoun, into accepting the "temporary" Syrian occupation of his country. Mr. Brahimi was the author of the Taif Agreement, which then permanently legitimated this occupation of Lebanon, by a Syrian Ba'athist regime which remains among the most murderously evil that exists.

As U.N. envoy to Afghanistan in 1997-99, Mr. Brahimi allowed his "peace brokering" between Taliban and Northern Alliance to be used as a front for the Taliban and Al Qaeda to launch a successful surprise military thrust into Northern Alliance territory.

His reputation derives chiefly from credit he claimed in brokering the end of the old apartheid regime in South Africa. (We won't go there, today.)

In Iraq, Mr. Brahimi has already persuaded the Bush administration to disband, before the June 30th turnover to local rule, the provisional governing council which has been the most diversely representative ruling body in the Arab world. In the presence of its Kurdish members, he has persistently referred to his "brother Arabs", as if the Kurds did not exist. He has been instrumental in negotiating an American climbdown, to allow thousands of members of Saddam's military and bureaucracy to reclaim their old jobs, over Shia objections. I expect that Mr. Brahimi's plan for a new transitional government of "technocrats" -- already agreed in principle by the Bush administration -- will admit several of them back to very high positions.

On Wednesday, Mr. Brahimi polished his credentials as an Arab advancing Arab interests in an interview with the radio network, France Inter. The reader will recall that President Bush has argued that the lack of democracy, freedom, and human rights are at the root of the problems in the Arab world. In direct contradiction of this view, Mr. Brahimi had this to say:

"There is no doubt that the great poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians, as well as the perception by the body of the population in the region, and beyond, of the injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support of the United States for this policy."

Mr. Brahimi was speaking as an envoy of the United Nations. It is the organization that is revealed to have kept Saddam's regime in money through years in which it might have collapsed under the pressure of U.S.-led sanctions. For there is no remaining doubt that the U.N.'s "oil-for-food" programme became Saddam's principal source of hard cash, and that far from being used to feed and medically treat the country's suffering children and innocents, billions and billions were systematically diverted to building more palaces, acquiring new weapons, and to lining the pockets of a rogues' gallery of self-interested Russians, Frenchmen, Arab and leftist journalists, probable terrorist frontmen, and the U.N.'s own staff and connexions including, almost certainly, Kofi Annan's son. (Lists of the alleged recipients are now easily searchable through the Internet.)

It breaks my heart to write this, but it's the way of the world.