"Is the United Nations still a force for good in the world? ...Looking at just a few of the UN's most recent "achievements," it's hard to answer in the affirmative. The Syrian catastrophe is just one of the UN's most spectacular ongoing failures, and not just in terms of the scale of the horror. It's in the UN's abysmal dereliction of every responsibility...
In Syria alone, mass atrocity, genocide, war crimes, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilian populations, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the resort to chemical warfare, the arbitrary deployment of armed force by UN member states - each of these are savageries the UN is specifically mandated to prevent. The outrages have proceeded without let or cease in Syria for five long years now, and the UN has even managed to make a mockery of its mandates in the provision of emergency humanitarian aid and the protection of refugees.
The UN's strenuous production of commemorative propaganda this year, to mark the 70th anniversary of its founding proceedings in San Francisco, have not helped matters... None of it, not the performances of Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang, not the Sept. 21 celebrations of the International Day of Peace, nor the grand United Nations Day concerts on Oct. 24, could conceal that the UN is looking more and more like its predecessor, the League of Nations, in its twilight years..."