I believe we should have taken the problem to the United Nations, let the United Nations work to resolve it.- Wesley Clark

So we will need the United Nations to help us deal with the threat from North Korea, for example, we will need the United Nations to help work out a resolution with regard to the whole standoff between India and Pakistan.- Carol Mosely Braun

I think that we must go back to the United Nations. I would say that my predecessor was wrong and that we are willing to submit to Kofi Annan for a multi-lateral redevelopment plan. - Al Sharpton

The U.N. has to be there. You get the U.N. in, the U.S. out. Once that happens, then the world community has a stake in what happens. - Dennis Kucinich

...for this mission to be successful, it is critically important that the United Nations, that other countries and our allies be involved so that we internationalize this effort.

My view is, we ought to turn the Iraqi civilian authority over to the United Nations tomorrow - John Edwards

He should turn the civil reconstruction of Iraq over to the United Nations.

It is incomprehensible to me that he has not done this. This is a failure of leadership of this president. - Dick Gephardt

But here we are now, it's time to go back to the United Nations and bring them in. - Joseph Lieberman

...we need to go to all those countries that the president insulted on his way into Iraq and get them to rethink their policy towards helping us under the auspices of both the United Nations and ourselves. - Howard Dean

I would go to the United Nations with a legitimate diplomatic effort, with humility, with a genuine effort to acknowledge some misjudgments, and to start to state clearly to the world, the way in which the world has a stake in what is happening. I would turn over to the U.N. legitimate authority for the civil reconstruction, for the humanitarian mission, and for the governance. And I would use the U.N.'s good services to help to internationalize this effort so that we reduce the sense of American occupation and the targeting of American troops. - John Kerry

So now we know what all of the Democratic presidential candidates are saying would be a foundation for their foreign policy - not to mention homeland security - if they're elected.

But here's what they're not saying:

The U.N. is the same organization that elected Nazi S.S. officer and death camp collaborator Kurt Waldheim as its secretary general, and the same organization that - to this day - sends him $125,000 a year in pension checks;

The U.N. weakly placed a lightly armed force of 460 peacekeepers in Srebrenica during the Bosnian conflict, and those peacekeepers were overwhelmed when Bosnian Serbs overran the city, slaughtered thousands of Muslim men and deported thousands of others;

In 1994, the U.N. stood idly by while almost 1 million Rwandans were massacred in tribal fighting and a bloody government overthrow. In one incident, then-Deputy Secretary General Kofi Annan told the leader of U.N. peacekeeping troops to help French soldiers evacuate their citizens from a technical school inside the country. "This should not, repeat not, extend to participating in possible combat, except in self-defense," Annan ordered the peacekeepers.

So they followed Annan's direct orders when, after the French evacuated their citizens, U.N. peacekeepers walked away from the school and allowed revolutionaries to stab, hack, and mutilate 2,000 Tutsi men, women and children;

The U.N. failed to prevent genocide in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, and, still, 30 years after the fact, the world is waiting for the U.N. to help dispense justice for atrocities in the Southeast Asian country.

Which brings the world to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. What the Democratic candidates haven't done is explain what the U.N. has done to earn anyone's trust. And yet, for each of the candidates, a strong U.N. role in our national security matters has become a cornerstone of their foreign policy proposals.

These may be issues to consider the next time a candidate is on the stump, jabbing a finger into the air and yelling about our need to involve the U.N. in Iraq.