Fix the UN

Last week saw the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly at its headquarters in New York City. As is customary of late, it has featured speeches by such notable orators as President Bush, and the usual psuedo-statesmen like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The former offered nothing new beyond variations of his stock "we are spreading freedom and democracy to those who desperately need it" pitch, and the other two used the captive audience - at least for Chavez, as the hall during Ahmadinejad's speech was about a third full - to criticize and condemn the United States. Chavez actually made personal attacks against the President, calling him "the devil" no less than eight times. Stuff like this is supposed to be impolite in the august body that is the United Nations, but as they say, this isn't your father's United Nations.

Say what you will about the President of the United States - and there is a lot to say, indeed - but he does have a point about the UN being out of control. In the last forty or so years, since most of the traditional colonial powers have beat feet out of Africa and Asia, there has been a dramatic increase in the membership of the UN, most of it being countries led by people with less than a firm grip on reality. (John Farmer has an excellent column on the current state of the UN in Friday's Newark Star-Ledger.)

Since we are one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, we contribute something like 25% of the UN's annual budget, and the UN is actually headquartered in New York, it would be bad form to boycott the annual fest bashing us. And since we are supposed to be above that sort of thing, that's why we sit there and listen. As many a politician had proudly noted afterward, people like Chavez can come to the United States and say things that he himself would never allow any of his countrymen to say.

That hasn't stopped the usual calls for radical change at the United Nations, "radical" meaning "get lost." Why should we allow such antics to go on here in our own country, when the vast majority of the people who make up the UN hate our guts, or so they refrain goes. And I would have to admit, there is some validity in that point of view. And to effect such "change" would be a bad thing.

Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy, that it is horrible except for just about every other form of government, can be applied to the UN, as well. No, the place doesn't do our bidding, nor is it supposed to. We sometimes forget that although we consume a quarter of the world's oil production, have perhaps the world's strongest economy, and certainly the strongest military (notice I didn't say "largest"), we are, population-wise, a mere fraction of the world, less than 5%. This may come as a shock to some people out there, but there are other people on this planet as well. Even though more wars have been fought in the last 50 years than in all the previous years combined, most of those have been the piddling regional kind, the type that has popped up because nobody really cared what went on there, anyway. Suddenly giving people there own governments in those Third World countries that never had one without any instructions on how to run it will tend to do that.

But there is a forum for the world to work out its problems, and imperfect that it might be, the UN is the best that we've got. Lately, we have turned to NATO to put muscle behind our intentions, and perhaps that is the way it should be. Maybe the UN really shouldn't have its own armed force, since you aren't going to get 190-plus member states to agree on anything, beyond how many scoops to put in the coffee urn at one of those fancy-pants gatherings.

Going back to that whole 5% of the world thing, we have to try. Having a permanent seat on the Security Council should count for something. To start with, find somebody else than John Bolton, who has all the smoothness of 40-grit sandpaper, to be the United States' UN Representative. He may be somebody who gets things done in Washington, but stuff like that doesn't fly with the champaign and caviar set.

Really making an effort to include everybody else on the really important issues, especially the Chinese and the Russians, since they have lots of people and lots of weapons, and the French, since they hold one of the vetoes, is also a good idea. The British are already on board, and everybody else is just gravy. It's fine to eventually just give up if you aren't going to get what you're looking for, but not after doing it for show. Everybody else knows that, and that isn't something out of "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

And for cryin' out loud, stop talking about how we should get rid of the United Nations, and send them to some place that might appreciate it more. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York said the other day on WABC-AM that the UN contributes $2.5 Billion dollars to the city economy yearly. Do you really think that the Germans should get that?