The savviest of observers are recognizing that calls for the resignation of Kofi Annan at the United Nations aren’t just about the secretary-general himself or the oil-for-food scandal. It is true that calls for Mr. Annan’s resignation have swelled since our own editorial, “Annan Past His Time,” suggesting he should step down, was issued November 18. Since then, Wm. Safire of the New York Times, the Times of London itself, and a leading Republican senator, Norman Coleman, have called for Mr. Annan to quit over the burgeoning disclosures in the oil-for-food scandal, including Claudia Rosett’s report that Mr. Annan’s son, Kojo, was taking lucrative non-compete payments from an oil-for-food contractor long after his father insisted his dealings with the contractor had been halted. Senator Shelby has joined in these calls, as have several members of New York’s own congressional delegation, including Peter King, Sue Kelly, and Vito Fosella. The New York Post, National Review and New Republic have all called for Mr. Annan to go.

It’s also true that Mr. Annan has started to draw the usual defenders, including several European heads of government, largely on the argument that the oil-for-food investigation isn’t over. On Saturday the New York Times hornswoggled one of the finest British commentators, Wm. Shawcross, into writing an op-ed piece that called the “growing demands” for Mr. Annan’s resignation “preposterous.” On Sunday the New York Times itself waddled into the fray with an editorial that complained that Mr. Annan himself wasn’t responsible for preventing the abuses that occurred under the oil-for-food program and concluded that the calls for Mr. Annan’s resignation “seemed wildly premature,” a formulation that left it room to abandon poor Mr. Annan once the evidence matures.

America, however, was not among Mr. Annan’s defenders. President Bush pointedly declined to come to the defense of the secretary general. This is because the fight over the Mr. Annan isn’t just about oil-for-food. It’s about the fact that the fact that Mr. Annan has taken the United Nations off the field in the war against Islamic terror. Not only did it retreat under fire when its mission was attacked in Iraq, not only have its institutions sought to maintain what is in effect a neutralist posture, but Mr. Annan himself has looked at America’s operations in the most heated theater, Iraq, and, in the middle of a presidential election, pronounced them illegal, an act that the secretary-general, given his sophistication, had to recognize amounted to siding with Senator Kerry.

Now, if all this came after eight years in which Mr. Annan had been doing an otherwise stellar job, it would be one thing. But Mr. Annan’s leadership was implicated in defaults that will tarnish the name of the United Nations for all time. Here we speak of the default in Rwanda, in which Mr. Annan’s judgment and management were both at fault, and at Sbrenica, which happened on Mr. Annan’s watch as undersecretary-general, and Mr. Annan’s own trip to Baghdad during the Clinton years, when he personally became involved in failing to hold the Iraqi tyrant to account. Looking back over the Annan years, one is hard put to think of something the U.N. did right.

This is why the savviest observers recognize resignation talk is not just about the secretary general or the oil-for-food scandal. The New York Times quoted the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, whom they characterize as a staunch admirer of Mr. Annan, as saying that although the administration was not endorsing calls by conservative commentators for Mr. Annan’s resignation, it quietly supported the criticism of him as part of a broader agenda. “It’s a double-barreled attack against him and what they regard as a failed institution,” Mr. Gelb said. “And they are deadly serious.” Exactly so. It was under the Clinton administration that Secretary Albright launched a move to set up a new institution of democratic nations. It’s a mystery why the Democrats are not seizing the chance to make this a bipartisan effort.