Sixty-Five Years of Circling the Drain: Happy Birthday, UN!
Even when the Security Council decides on something — like disarming Saddam Hussein — action to achieve this aim can still be frustrated by subsequent vetoes.
Other UN bodies, like the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), reflect these adverse conditions. Established in 2006 to replace the corrupt and ineffective Human Rights Commission, the HRC has proved no better, and is arguably worse.
Non-democratic African and Asian regimes exercise an unbreakable controlling majority of 26 of its 47 seats. It is these dictatorships that set the Council’s agenda and determine its vote. In four years, the HRC has closed off investigation of the worst human rights abuses in Belarus, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
In these circumstances, democracies can change the UN only so far. The Reagan administration, for example, pressured the UN through the purse-strings by withholding dues, and withdrew from corrupt bodies like UNESCO. But such efforts need to be sustained when the UN reverts to worst practice. In any event, joining the jackals, as if that could somehow tame their appetites, is worse than useless. It merely lends legitimacy that would have been better denied. The Obama administration took the U.S. into the HRC last year in the declared hope of effecting change. It didn’t. One month after the Obama administration joined the HRC, it terminated investigation into human rights abuses in Congo. In May, Libya joined the HRC. The Obama administration’s objections were simply ignored.
There is another way. The U.S., which provides a quarter of the UN budget, should consider some options. It could hold the UN to performance standards before disbursing funds. It could withdraw from irredeemable bodies like the HRC. It could back a new caucus of democratic nations. It could reallocate funds to external initiatives that actually do some good.
But who expects the Obama administration to do any of these things?
“The U.S., which provides a quarter of the UN budget, should consider some options.”
Yes, like pulling out of the UN and throwing them out of the United States. The UN, which was tragically flawed from the very beginning, should never have been created. It was an horrible extension of Wilson’s “League of Nations” and it was created after World War II in fond hopes that it would actually DO something to prevent future conflicts. Since then, it has done none of that. If anything, it has allowed carnage to spread around the world. While overpaid and bloated bureaucrats in New York discussed the best places to go to lunch in Manhattan, people were actually dieing around the world because of their inaction.
People tend to forget that, during the Cold War, the UN did next to nothing to intervene in some of the most terrible breaches of international law (whatever that is). The UN did nothing when Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan were invaded by the Soviet Union, they did nothing about the slaughter in Rwanda until it was much too late, and they obviously did nothing of any merit in Bosnia and Kosovo as people were killed in the thousands. The Balkan situation was only saved by the direct intervention of the US Air Force and after the United States took over both of those operations. And these are only a few examples of how the UN has totally failed over the years.
It really is time to end the UN. It should go the way of the Berlin Wall (which the UN also failed to stop) and we should stop wasting our time and money with it. Perhaps they should go to some Third-World country and set up shop there, since most of their members are filled with Third-World dictators anyway. All of the charity organizations run by the UN could probably be done more cheaply and more efficiently through private organizations and I would certainly rather give the money to a non-profit organization rather than a bunch of bureaucrats who are pocketing the money themselves (such as with the infamous Oil-for-Food program).
No, it is time to let this big, bloated, inefficient international organization die under its own weight. We would not only save a lot of money, but we would also probably save a lot of lives too. People around the globe would no longer be depending on an organization that can’t even run itself, let alone other people.
….”It could withdraw from irredeemable bodies like the HRC.”
How about:
The United States could withdraw from the irredeemable United Nations.
In retrospect, the United States not joining the League Of Nations now seems prescient…right?
Yep.
Oh, and BY THE WAY, the “rescue” of Kuwait was not such a great idea after all. The upshot is that the US has been drawn into yet another quagmire. Under absolutely NO circumstances whatsoever should American blood and treasure be expended on behalf of a majority-Muslim country in any part of the world.
“Its founders would be amazed at the Frankenstein creation that now sits on Manhattan’s East River.” Really? The founders would be overjoyed! The UN was created to be a utopian TOTALITARIAN OVERLORD which would replace sovereign nations. Founded by fascists, communists, despots, and the like minded, it has lived up to everything it was supposed to be. What has been forgotten is the loft language concocted to deceive and divert attention from its real purpose. It was conceived in duplicity and treachery ad it remains just exactly what it was supposed to be.
HEAR! HEAR!
“The U.S., which provides a quarter of the UN budget, should consider some options.”
The UN is a lost cause not worth trying to save. The one option the US should consider and act on is total withdrawal from a corrupt, morally bankrupt UN.
Here’s one option for the USA to consider:
Send a destroyer up the Hudson to East 45th Street and have it fire away at those miserable Nazi scum until the building is rubble.
It seems the Tea Party folks have overlooked the UN as a target for Americans’ wrath amidst the target-rich environment of 2010. Why not push to get the UN out of the US? Let the left rise up to defend that wretched institution as further confirmation of their stupidity and irrelevance? Give them 90 days to pack up and leave for some third-world pigsty more appropriate for their nefarious activities! There’s probably plenty of beachfront property in Phuket that could provide for them (until the next tsunami comes along). Meanwhile I believe we should stay as members just to limit the damage they can do to us while we construct a meaningful alliance of freedom-loving nations to which tin-pot dictators need not apply.
The UN stopped doing anything worth while a long time ago, it is past time to have them follow the League of Nations into oblivion.
Its Obama’s wish that the UN actually becomes a world governing body. I think he sees himself as the head of it some day. Just think, he would have the UN telling the USA what to do and how to do it. Its the new Eutopia.
In defense of the UN it has a nice looking building.
The United Nations has become the greatest anti-Semitic organisation since the NSDAP. Divine irony demonstrates the limitations of human frailty when the organisation which gave temporal sanction to a Jewish State is now its most vociferous enemy. Whilst UN failings are many, none is more poignant of its contradictions, irrelevance and hypocrisies than when a member state is held to exceptional account in a manner that is against all its articles of association and benefits of membership.
And do these nations think that this will go unpunished?
The best thing the UN could do is disband itself.
For a long, long time we have wished for the UN to disappear from New York. We would like for the UN to move to Dafur, or someplace like Dafur. Why should these people live it up in NY, all they do is break parking laws?
Aunty M
“Come out of her, my people, and be not partakers of her plagues.” This Biblical advice is worth heeding. Either we get out of the UN, or we will go down with it. Maybe we can hire some terrorists, to get rid of the building — cheap demolition, of a structure that is no longer useful for anything.
I do not think that the USA should leave the UN. That is not because I believe the UN to be redeemable, far from it. I recognize, however, that there are many dimwits around the world who still look at it as a moral paragon, and think its bloviations are the ultimate moral judgements in international affairs. We should remain in the UN to exercise our veto power over any noxious resolutions aimed at us or our friends. Otherwise the mental pygmies will see UN resolutions passed condemning Israel for defending itself against genocide, or the US for fighting terrorists or invaders of friendly countries.
I do think we should lower our financial contributions, though. The USA has about 5 percent of the world’s population. That is the percentage of the UN budget that we should fund. We now pay about 22 percent. And that budget should be strictly limited in order to keep it low. Anything above what we consider reasonable, we should not pay for it. As for peacekeeping operations, of which we pay about forty percent, if they do any good we should help them out, even contributing troops on a temporary basis. For example, we could have sent ammunition to General Dallare in Rwanda and encouraged him to disobey Kofi Annan’s orders not to intervene when the Hutus started massacring Tutsis. We should, on the other hand, refuse to pay anything for “peacekeeping forces” that do not do their jobs. The present force on the border between Lebanon and Syria has been complicit in Hezbollah rearming massively, in preparation for another go-round with Israel, contrary to the Resolution that set up that force. Cut them off.
http://www.unisevil.com
All the crap they statists want to hide.
A Note of Interest: The UN does do ONE THING VERY WELL.
The UN composes the list of refugees admitted to the USA which
is rubberstamped by Obama and implemented by the State Department
apparachiks. This year 80,000 Somalis have been ushered into the
heartland of the USA. The total is now over 1 million and they
are all given US irrevocable US citizenship.
Small towns like Shelbyville Tennessee, Lewiston Maine, Ft. Wayne Indiana will receive an Islamic invasionfundamentally at war with every value these towns hold dear. These towns have no say in the matter or way to defend itself. Several
dozen bomb plots, hijackings have been hatched amongst these “refugees”
against the USA, these refugees are a breeding ground for Al Queda
recruitment as witness the dispatch back to Somalia and Afghanistan of suicide bomb squads from Minneapolis
and Lewiston etc. America will be fighting an Islamic militancy in its heartland
for the rest of Americas existence as a nation. 100 years from now it will
be going on. Just as has been going on for centuries in every country
where Islam mixes with a non Islamic population. So the UN did ONE THING
very well..it corrupted and compromised the very core of the USA forever.
UN rewards failure and disharmony.
USA; 52 states 1 vote
Canada; 12 provinces 1 vote
versus 22 arab ” countries “,
16 spanish speaking countries
I apologize if my numbers are not exact but you understand my message.
How can the WEST ( ie, Canada, USA, Australia, UK ) ever get power if they are so outnumbered all of the time. Spanish speaking countries are almost all left wing and anti US ( except Colombia) and being poor, vulnerable to Arab and Chinese and Russian money?
This ” 1 country 1 vote” engenders disharmony. Why would Venezuela abnd Colombia ever unite or why would South America ever unite? They will lose many votes and influence and reasons to be enticed by Russia or China?
SOLUTION – USA self divides into 52 countries; Canada into 12 countries; problem solved.
Sounds ridiculous but so is the fact that at least 1/3 to 2/5 of UN time and budget is devoted to bashing or discussing Israel or America.
This is not the UN of Elinor Roosevelt or Rene Cassin.
No action on Darfur, Sudan nor the illegal British occupation of Gibraltar nor the Turkish occupation of Cyprus.