Far be it from me to question the timing of Kofi Annan's latest accusation that the Iraq War is illegal:

Key states who joined the US-led invasion of Iraq have rejected claims by the United Nations secretary general that the war was illegal.

Kofi Annan told the BBC the decision to take action in Iraq contravened the UN charter and should have been made by the Security Council, not unilaterally.

But authorities in the UK, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria and Japan said the war was backed by international law.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard described the UN as a "paralysed" body.

And a former Bush administration aide, Randy Scheunemann, branded Mr Annan's comments "outrageous".

But I didn't see any mention of UN-SCAM -- the Saddam Hussein "Oil for Food" scandal which involves much of the UN high command as well as Annan and his family. Perhaps it wasn't considered relevant that the countries opposing the Iraq war were the same ones taking the bribes.

Here's more on Annan's touching concern for legal niceties:

[T]he U.N. got in on the action. It received administrative fees of about $2 billion for the program, which may be fair, but the senior U.N. official in charge of the program, Benon Sevan, is reported to have received 11.5 million barrels himself. Cotecna, a Swiss-based firm hired by the U.N. to monitor the import of the food and medicine to Iraq, hired Kojo Annan, the son of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a consultant during the period when the company was assembling and submitting bids for the oil-for-food program. All of these coincidences were reported by Claudia Rosett in the National Review. None, surprisingly, were disclosed by the U.N., Cotecna, or the senior or junior Annan. The imposition of so-called smart sanctions on Iraq, several years after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, allowed Saddam to purchase items besides food and medicine. But some of the things approved by Kofi Annan seem pretty far afield. There was the $20 million he authorized for an Olympic sports city for Uday Hussein, Saddam's reprehensible (and now deceased) oldest son. And then there was the $50 million for TV and radio equipment for Saddam's ham-handed propaganda machine. This is food? Gives new meaning to Kofi Annan's statement, in 1998, that Saddam was a man "I can do business with." And how.

But once again, it's not for me to question the timing when others predicted exactly this sort of thing months ago, Here's what scholar and human rights activist Anne Bayefsky wrote in a piece called "The Kerry-Kofi Plan for America’s Future":

Kerry's foreign-policy strategy will now encourage Annan to issue more self-serving reports and statements in the run-up to the election, in the expectation that a Kerry win will mean legitimizing U.S. foreign policy in U.N. offices rather than in American homes.

According to Kerry, the U.N. "is the key that opens the door."

And Kofi may be afraid they're gonna change the locks.....

MORE: Writing in the New York Post, Amir Taheri has questions:

....[W]hy is [Annan] making these wild accusations?

May be he wants to please the anti-war coalition, which is certainly strong throughout the world. Maybe he wants to enter history as a man who opposed war. May be he is hoping for one of those things they distribute at the Nobel academy in Stockholm every October.

Whatever Annan's private reasons, he has acted most dishonorably. If he really believes that international law has been violated, he should do something, even if he knows that whatever he does will get nowhere.

If, on the other hand, he is making these accusations just to look good, he must know that he is destroying the little that is left of the U.N.'s credibility. How can an organization, whose chief executive accuses the principal members of its board of violating its charter with impunity, be taken seriously?

Why didn't Annan resign when he clearly saw that the U.N. Charter was being violated by a group of "rogue states" led by America? And why, if the toppling of Saddam was illegal, is the U.N. helping consolidate regime change in Iraq by supervising elections for a new government?

But I wouldn't expect key answers!