After reading Andy McCarthy’s excellent NRO piece on the U.N., I shared with him – and want to share with Corner readers, too — a footnote.

About 6 o’clock last night, I received a call from the BBC.

It seems Kofi Annan had given the BBC an interview in which he said that the US intervention in Iraq was “illegal.”

The BBC folks were very excited about this; never before had Kofi had gone quite that far.

But to round out the story they wanted a response from a bona fide American unilateralist-cum-troglodyte — so they called me. I was happy to oblige.

I explained as best I could that Kofi Annan is entitled to his personal opinions, but that we should understand he is not the Chief Justice of a World Supreme Court, and he is not President of a world government.

He heads up an international debating society. His pronouncements on international law are not final or even authoritative.

I added that if legalities were under discussion, Mr. Annan might want to discuss history’s largest corruption scandal which took place under his auspices. (It would be helpful were he to at least release the records on the UN Food for Oil program to investigators – or to Claudia Rosett.)

Also, on his watch, numerous crimes against humanity are now being committed, for example in Sudan and North Korea. He evidently is not “seized with these issues.” And we should not forget Rwanda where a genocide was committed that did not appear to rankle him nearly so much as the liberation of Iraq from one of the world’s most brutal and dangerous dictators.

The BBC interviewer, of course, was not persuaded. He was far too gleeful about the UN Secretary General calling the US an international criminal, a view he clearly shared. The BBC has become so ideologically biased as to make Dan Rather look like Brian Lamb.