After the U.N., Plan B
Ah, the United Nations—can’t live with it, can’t live without it!
But I think it may be time for the U.S., having tried to live with a corrupt, hypocritical, impotent monument to how disastrous a one-world government would be—while supplying the lion’s share of its funding— to try living without it.
The U.N. Human Rights Council has issued a 23-page report praising the Gaddafi regime’s human-rights record.
Let me repeat that.
The U.N. Human Rights Council has issued a 23-page report praising the Gaddafi regime’s human-rights record!!!
Maybe the report won’t be approved: it doesn’t matter. This is an organization that will not muster international force to stop brutal massacres; it is an organization that specializes in toothless sanctions when action is desperately needed. In the Iraq debacle, it issued resolutions that it refused to enforce when violated, while noting that individual countries were free to act themselves. When the U.S. did act, prudently or not, the U.N. condemned it, not in small part because U.N. officials, Russia and France were making copious back-door profits dealing with Saddam Hussein.
The United Nations is such a fraud, so dishonest, so corrupt, so timid, so inept, that the United States degrades itself by belonging to it. Does the world need a world organization? Absolutely, but nobody needs this cynical disgrace for one. An organization that thinks a government in the process of mowing down its own people in the streets is, or ever was, a model of human rights protection is a sick joke. Here is an excellent candidate for budget cutting: ending support for an expensive international fiasco. It should go even before NPR and PBS.
We should have no illusions about the unsavory regimes and individuals foreign policy sometimes requires a country to tolerate. Organizations, however, can be replaced, and lousy organizations should be replaced. The most efficient way to replace this one is to for the U.S. to announce it will be giving its U.N, support to the Smithsonian primate house until a more suitable recipient appears.
Ethics Alarms 
I completely agree that we should totally defund this nasty joke called the UN. Both the League of Nations and the UN have failed to abide Kant’s ideas for Perpetual Peace.
We should also sell the prime real estate at Turtle Bay to improve conditions at VA hospitals and other veteran’s benefits since these folks put their lives and limbs on the line in a serious attempt to keep world peace. Ironically, that piece of property was cleared of slaughterhouses to build the current headquarters.
Just got finished reading the UN report, thank you, JM. Heretofore I’ve always had a generally amiable, if uninformed, attitude to the idea of the UN.
During World War II, Noel Coward composed a bitingly satirical song, “Let’s Don’t Be Beastly To The Germans”. I suggest Googling it, substituting Gadafi or Libya, wherever Germans or Nazis occurs, to see what a bunch of namby-pambies the UN consists of.
I read a news story today that talked about how Gaddafi was on the UN Rights Council, which probably explains why that report was presented. Luckily, that report was tabled. The UN hasn’t kicked Libya off that council yet (they’re still discussing it).
To play the devil’s advocate, the UN can only do as much as its member states allow it do. So while we would like to see the UN intervene when genocide is occurring or when human rights are violated, it’s the various countries that decide yay or nay. But I’ll admit that that doesn’t explain why it has so much corruption.
It’s a corrupt organization, dominated by corrupt powers. The US gives it legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.
Let me add a belated “Amen” to your remarks, Jack.