Obama and U.N.: R-e-f-o-r-m
January 19, 2009
Pittsburgh Tribune Review 
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President-elect Barack Obama calls today's United Nations an indispensable and imperfect forum. That's quite a salutation for a world body steeped in corruption and steadfast in its contempt for the United States.
For all of the U.N.'s storied shortcomings -- waste, fraud and bureaucratic bloat -- a fresh start, with a new League of Democracies, as urged by Sen. John McCain, would be a more laudable goal for the incoming president. But that's not going to happen.
Instead Mr. Obama wants a commitment to reform. And there are plenty of areas in which to begin. A few from Heritage Foundation fellows Brett D. Schaefer and Steven Groves:
• Improve U.N. transparency, management and accountability.
• Do not seat a U.S. representative on the U.N.'s reprehensible Human Rights Council of the world's worst reprobates.
• Encourage a new forum for the pursuit of human rights to replace the U.N.'s own politicized system, which makes assessment and redress impossible. 
• Boycott the U.N. Durban II conference in April against racism and discrimination, which, like its predecessor, is sure to be a special-interests spectacle with Israel as the soup du jour.
If Obama is committed to U.N. reforms, even though the U.N. isn't, he can begin the process immediately, in earnest, by withholding U.S. funding. 
Without a cudgel for his cause, Obama will see any suggested reforms sink steadily into the muck that is Turtle Bay.