The UN: UNsuccessful, UNethical, UNneeded

Written by Justin Darr
November 22, 2004 
ChronWatch
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=11296&catcode=39
      The United Nations has failed again.  Somehow, the U.N. has found time away from obstructing the investigation into its collusion with Saddam Hussein to rob billions of dollars from the ''Iraqi Oil for Bribes,'' I mean ''Food'' program, to doom thousands of Africans to certain genocide in the Darfur region of  Sudan.  In its infinite wisdom, the U.N. has decided to offer the radical Islamist government of Sudan a package of trade deals and financial incentives rather than any threat of international sanctions to curtail their wonton slaughter of their non-Moslem citizens.  If the Sudanese comply, they will be able to build a nice, shiny, new airport and Western style shopping mall, and if they refuse… Well, nothing happens, and things can go on as they are.  Situation normal for the United Nations.

      Incidents such as these add the latest fuel to the fire of critics of the U.N. who say the time is long past for the United States to leave the morally bankrupt, ineffective, anti-American international body.  It is easy to agree with the sentiment.  Why should we pay billions of dollars a year to an organization that is actively working against us and feels unaccountable for its own actions?  The reality of the matter, however, is the United States leaving the U.N. would solve nothing.  The United Nations would continue on as it has, probably getting worse without America taking a stand for freedom and democracy, and the United States would effectively ostracize itself from a potentially useful outlet for international diplomacy.
      No, the problem is not the United States’ membership in the U.N., but the United Nations itself.  In its 60-year history, the U.N. has accomplished nothing.  Its only successes have been the result of the U.N. loaning out its name in the form of an ''endorsement'' of an action that would have been done regardless if the U.N. existed.  On its own, the United Nations has failed to realize even its most fundamental charges.  For example, even in the areas of preventing genocide and fighting world hunger and disease, the U.N. has vividly demonstrated its ineptness.  

      According to www.genocide.org, since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, over 81 million people have been killed in racial, religious, and political genocides across the world.  This number is 1350% greater than all those killed in the Nazi death camps.  But now, instead of innocents dying under the swastika, they are perishing under the blue flag of the U.N. and its farcical peacekeeping missions. 
       Just within the past few years hundreds of civilians where slaughtered in Srebrenica, Bosnia, within eyeshot of 600 Dutch U.N. peacekeepers who felt they were not authorized to interfere.  And in Rwanda, millions were killed in ethnic cleansing campaigns conducted under the nose of another U.N. peacekeeping mission led by now U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.  Just what does the U.N. think ''preventing genocide'' means?  It is obvious that the United Nations has not only failed in its mission to prevent genocide, but has actually acted as its enabler, leading to the bloodiest 60 years in history.

      The United Nations' incompetence extends far beyond its peacekeeping missions.  In the fight against starvation and disease, time and time again the U.N. has mismanaged and wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of aid on spurious projects that seem aimed more toward their personal aggrandizement and creature comforts than helping the suffering around the world.  For example, in the 1980's, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, the U.N. spent over $75 million building and upgrading apartment complexes for U.N. administrators and aid workers in Ethiopia while food supplies rotted on the docks, unable to reach famine stricken areas due to a lack of transportation vehicles.  
      And more recently, in East Timor, the U.N. spent over $50 million to build hotels and supermarkets for foreign visitors while neglecting the development of much needed local infrastructure and hospitals.  The U.N. acts like any other European Socialist bureaucracy.  The bureaucrats arrogantly assume they know what is best for others at all times and any decision they make is correct for the simple reason that they made it.  Above all else, the bureaucrats protect their own, accepting no responsibility for errors, and ensuring that all blame is placed outside of the organization.  The end result is the U.N. being content to give starving people what the United Nations say they need, not what the people require.  If people want food and medicine, they get a soccer stadium.  If people want a democracy, they are given a U.N. generated bureaucracy.  The people want freedom, they get the status quo.

      The problem with the United Nations is it wants all the power of a World Parliament but will assume none of the responsibility associated with such power.  In effect, the goal of the U.N. is to dictate world peace on its terms, not facilitate it in a spirit of freedom and democracy.  An international body dedicated to the debate of ideas and opening avenues of diplomacy is a wonderful idea, but it will never work so long as the international body feels no accountability to the sovereign nations which compose it or the people of the world it claims to protect.  After billions of dollars and countless lives lost on an idea that does not work,  the United States should lead the charge to replace this fatally flawed institution with an international body that might offer the world a real hope for freedom, democracy, and prosperity.  
About the Writer: Justin Darr is a freelance writer living in the Philadelphia area with his wife, Erin, and twin children. He can be read widely on the Internet and in print publications in the United States and Europe .