Let me echo Buddy Larsen. Your coverage of the UN’s moral and operational collapse is a signal contribution to the current discourse and the historical record. In “The Shield of Achilles” Philip Bobbit argues (to me, quite persuasively) that the State is evolving from “nation-state” to “market-state” and that the legitimating narratives and rules of play within and between states are changing quickly and drastically. I think we all feel the old world passing away; and with it will pass the inter-State arrangements for stability such as the UN. Ever since the rape of Srebenica (and for those able and willing to watch, well before that) the UN has been obviously moribund. Its failure of vision and will, and its self-serving corruption of the moral vocabulary, have only grown more toxic. Not only does it not produce good, not only does it dissipate energies that a better system could better use; it also actively shelters and furthers genocidal tyrannies and dead-end kleptocracies that have taken the form and expect the privileges of sovereign nations in an unsustainable masquerade paid for by the few liberal democracies on which they heap abuse. You are helping us all to see and remember this clearly. We will need that clarity as the State struggles toward a new relationship with its citizens and its neighbors. Chavez and Ahmedinijad represent the necrotic form of the old nation-state. Let us hope they do not stand for the form in which, or with which, the market-state will emerge.