re: #8 Bob Levin

So your only option to the UN is to go back in time to 1913? I would hope for a global body that isn’t thoroughly corrupt as an option. If that is too pie in the sky, then no lives are going to be saved, because that’s not what the UN does.

The UN has an appalling record when it comes to stopping genocide, simple war, or crimes against humanity. They didn’t stop Stalinist Russia during the slaughter of 20,000,000 people. They didn’t stop Maoist China from killing 50,000,000 people. When Nasser wanted to wipe out Israel, the UN politely left the region for the time allotted to get the job done. I don’t recall Pol Pot living in fear of the UN. Iran toys with the UN, Kim Jung Ill does whatever he does to laugh at the UN.

The UN turns a blind eye to the Sudan, Somalia, and Serbia and lets people like Charles Taylor do his thing for entirely too long. It allowed itself to be enthusiastically corrupted by Saddam Hussein. It regularly appoints the most egregious violators of human rights to the very commissions whose mission is to stop the very behavior its sitting members exhibit as a matter of pride.

I’m just scraping the surface of the mass murder it has failed to stop, the hypocrisy it exhibits on a daily basis. It’s peace keeping missions are ludicrous.

And the only argument you can mount in favor of this augustly corrupt body is—it’s better than nothing?

Nothing might be better. I’m willing to give nothing a chance. At least it would be easier to park in New York.

They can’t stop any of those things. It’s outside of their charter.

The central tenet of the UN is a nation’s sovereignty is sacrosanct. It can’t stop genocide. It can’t stop oppression. It can only act when a nation attacks another nation as when North Korea attacked South Korea or Kuwait was invaded by Iraq.

Admittedly it often fails to act, but that is due to the vetoes on the Security Council, vetoes which were pretty much required to get the big powers on board. If any of the big powers hadn’t been part of the UN, as America hadn’t been part of the League of Nations, the UN would have fallen apart very quickly. With the same results that the collapse of the League lead to, this time with weapons of mass destruction.

And you should be relieved that the UN is so powerless. If it was strong enough to do the things you want, it would be strong enough to force Israel to give back what it took from its neighbouring nations in 1967.

Yeah, the UN has major problems. But the alternative is worse, far worse.