Roger Franklin: Ideal revenge - send the UN to Saddam

By ROGER FRANKLIN

There are many good reasons why the United States should attack Iraq with United Nations approval - and just as many-plus-one why going ahead without it would be an even neater idea.

If the dire noises from TV's talking heads are correct, an unsanctioned US assault would render the world forum useless.

All those diplomats might as well furl their baby-blue flag and head home for good.

And from a New Yorker's perspective, few things would bring more pleasure.

Let the UN pack it in. Surrender those diplomatic parking spaces, cancel the lunch reservations at Lutece and arrange for the NYPD to ban civilian traffic from the Van Wyck Expressway so the whole shifty crew of crooks, spooks, rapists and rorters can get to JFK Airport that much faster.

The quality of life in the Big Apple could only improve if that cavalcade hit the road - and few New Yorkers would be sad to see it go.



Even the handful of frozen greybeards and adolescent revolutionaries who gather irregularly across First Avenue to shout pro-Saddam slogans would probably endorse the idea, although they might prefer if the UN simply moved itself to a warmer location.

Somewhere like Rwanda, perhaps, where the UN could coexist with the ravaged reminders of how little it did to stop the Hutus and Tutsis tearing each other apart.

Iraq might be a possibility, too, since it is due to take charge of the UN Conference on Disarmament in March.

I think the perfect destination would be Sudan. A posse of its UN envoys once made the apartment in which I now live the bane of the building's other residents.

It's a funny thing about New Yorkers, but for all their broadminded tolerance they still tend to think that chickens, baby goats and other small animals shouldn't be slaughtered in the bathroom nor cooked over open charcoal fires in the living room.

These were small considerations, however, compared with the Sudanese officials' eagerness to turn the apartment into a sanctuary for threats to public health.

The human ones were the would-be terrorists who my home's former residents supplied with diplomatic licence plates for the truck bombs they intended to detonate in 1995 beneath a long list of Gotham's landmarks.

The more common roaches were the thousands upon thousands of dead bugs that clogged every crack and cranny after the Sudanese moved out.

A first-hand taste of Khartoum-style sanitation would be just desserts for those suave French diplomats - one far more richly deserved than those served at the East Side's celebrated boites, where double-parked diplomatic limos stall traffic on the narrow streets.

A UN exit from New York would also ease the burden on the city's cops, who seldom go more than a few weeks without having to don the kid gloves for another diplomatic miscreant.

The latest incident came last month when Pakistan's UN envoy was arrested after a live-in girlfriend complained that he had knocked her silly with a preemptive strike.

For days the papers carried updates on the "diplo-basher", who was supposedly set to be stripped of diplomatic immunity and charged with assault. It didn't happen, but then it seldom does.

If the district attorney and State Department don't decide to go easy, as they almost always do, the suspect diplomat's own government usually withdraws the offender, especially when the accusation involves torture, rape, robbery or drug smuggling - all of which the past few years have witnessed.

At least major crimes get some reaction. The little ones are simply shrugged off at UN headquarters, where scofflaw envoys have amassed US$22 million ($39.9 million) worth of unpaid parking fines since 1997.

And then there are the peculiar cultural habits some UN envoys insist on sharing with the locals - things like the stomach-turning spectacle that took place every night for several months late last year in the empty store directly opposite the world body's front gates.

For some reason, adherents of some obscure religion turned the front window into a shrine by placing large bowls of rice and water between a pair of candles.

During the daytime, the offerings weren't worth a second glance. But when the sun went down, disgusted screams of passersby punctuated the quiet of the East Side evening.

The reason: that mound of rice attracted every rat for blocks around and the window became, just like the General Assembly, a stomach-turning spectacle of yellow teeth and shameless self interest.