News coverage of the United Nations gets confusing sometimes. Is the U.N. a vital institution or a dysfunctional relic? Are its Security Council resolutions profoundly important for international relations -- or beside the point because global leadership must now come from the world's only superpower?

These days, we keep hearing that the United States will need to launch a full-scale attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein has violated U.N. Security Council resolutions -- at the same time that we're told the U.S. government must reserve the right to take military action unilaterally if the Security Council fails to make appropriate decisions about Iraq.

To clarify the situation, here are three basic guidelines for understanding how to think in sync with America's leading politicians and pundits:

* The U.N. resolutions approved by the five permanent members of the Security Council are hugely important, and worthy of enforcement with massive military force, if the White House says so. Otherwise, the resolutions have little or no significance, and they certainly can't be

AUSTIN, Texas -- One thing I have always admired about the U.S. military services is their ability to learn from their mistakes. They have institutionalized this ability in the form of remarkable After Action Reviews, which include rigorous dissection of every aspect of whatever operation they were last required to take.

These AARs are both unsparing and illuminating -- I recall the particularly trenchant review of the (SET ITAL) opera bouffe (END ITAL) episode in which they were required to invade Grenada, an exercise so stunningly silly that it is beneath comment. They should have sent a Texas Ranger.

Of course, the military spent years poring over Vietnam, the one it lost. Even now, the feelings of many are still so tender on that one that I feel obliged to point out they didn't actually lose it -- they were sent into an unwinnable situation.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I realize it's early days for this sort of thing, but I already have a nomination for dumbest sentence of the decade. You have a mere eight years to top this one, so you'd better get cracking.

I found it in the midst of nasty little ad hominem attack on Bill Moyers in The Weekly Standard. The writer, Stephen F. Hayes, is laboring under the delusion that Moyers is "dedicated to promoting the views of most extreme elements of the far left in America." One can only conclude that Hayes has never met anyone on the far left: Billy Don Moyers from Marshall, Texas, is actually a Baptist, albeit of the Jimmy Carter school.

Hayes worked himself up into a fine lather of indignation because "Moyers spends much of his time pointing out the conflicts-of-interest of those in government and corporate America." Some would call that journalism, but it was not the inanity of the attack on Moyers that stopped me. It was this sentence, which Hayes stuck in to show how far-left he thinks Moyers is: "Moyers used water rights in Bolivia as an illustration of the perils of capitalism."

AUSTIN, Texas -- The economy is a mess. We are now in the second dip of a double-dip recession. ("Looks like a W," say the economists, another reason why economists are not famous for their humor.) Six and a quarter trillion dollars has disappeared from the stock markets. We have so far to go in cleaning up corporate corruption, it makes the Augean stables look like spilt milk.

In the Sept. 23 issue of The New Yorker is an excellent piece called "The Greed Cycle," examining the effects of stock options on corporate culture. The most depressing thing about it is that even though it is a long article, it doesn't begin to cover the range of iniquities and inanities that have been allowed to flourish.

Robert Bryce's Enron book, "Pipedreams," provides more chilling detail. Mickie Siebert, the legendary and impressive head of Muriel Siebert & Co. (and a Republican) has been calling attention to the dangers of derivatives for years. Nothing was done even after Long Term Capital Management's spectacular failure. How many disasters does it take to get Washington's attention?

All through the '80s and '90s, professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio and Charles Murray grew sleek from best sellers about the criminal, probably innate, propensities of the "underclass," about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms.

Now, there was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.

Given a green light in the late 1970s by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by the 1990s, America's corporate leadership had evolved a simple strategy for criminal self-enrichment.