ON CONSECUTIVE DAYS this week, China and France insisted that the Bush administration seek U.N. approval before sending troops to Iraq. CNN and several other news organizations described the decision by the Chinese as a “blow” to U.S. efforts to oust Saddam. Similar fretting came Thursday after French President Jacques Chirac implored the United States to work through the U.N. Security Council.

But France and China, along with longtime Iraq ally Russia, are among the practical reasons that President Bush should be highly skeptical of any return to the United Nations in dealing with Iraq. Those countries, which occupy three of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, (the United States and Britain have the other two) have used that influential perch for more than a decade to thwart many of the serious efforts to disarm Iraq, despite Saddam’s obvious and arrogant flouting of the U.N. resolutions requiring him to do so. This dissension among Security Council heavyweights no doubt emboldened Saddam as he continued developing and concealing his weapons of mass destruction from inspectors throughout the ’90s.