12/07/2004 10:27:25 AM|||Toni|||Lets hope at some time in the near future the US and it's 'Real' allies realize the hopelessness of reforming the UN and pull out as the final statement of this editorial states.

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Let's call the dishonor roll:

• Failing to enforce 17 resolutions against Saddam, tolerating his ejection of U.N. weapons inspectors, and even enabling him to stay in power by looking the other way as he exploited Oil for Food.

• Failing to use U.N. peacekeepers already in place to stop the Rwanda genocide in 1994, and, worse, handing over thousands of Bosnian Muslim men for slaughter by the Serbs at Srebrenica in 1995.

• Failing to act in Kosovo in 1999, amid the threat of a Russian veto, leaving NATO the task of preventing a bloody civil war on European soil.

• As recently as this year, failing to stop the massacre of African Muslims in Sudan's Darfur province.

• And failing even to bring up for formal debate, let alone action, North Korean and Iranian violations of non-proliferation agreements.

One alternative that might work is to scrap the Security Council in favor of some larger caucus of democratic nations. No member would have a veto and the body would not presume to be the voice of "international law." Having the U.N. finally distinguish between representative and non-representative governments would itself be an enormous force for peace and security, since many countries might race to qualify for the club and democracies rarely act aggressively.

We understand such changes may be impossible given the way the U.N. is currently constituted. (There's the veto problem again.) But if that's so, then countries that actually believe in effective multilateralism--rather than in merely tying down the American Gulliver--would be more than justified in setting up a parallel talking shop and letting the one at Turtle Bay stay lost in space.


|||110243685598296455|||On Planet U.N. - The Security Council provides no security.