The United Nations was founded in 1948 upon a flawed premise: that all nations would willingly work together for the betterment of the entire world. In the past few years alone, we have seen the consequences of believing that falsehood we told ourselves for over fifty years. Perhaps the time has come at last to examine the UN and its role, and how well -- if at all -- it functions in the real world.

Possibly the worst failing of the UN is its insistence that any group which can claim a territory should receive all the benefits and deference due a nation as old as Great Britain, as powerful as the United States, as populous as China or as large as the former Soviet Union.  This has given gangs of thugs -- Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party, for instance -- the assurance that if they could just hold a nation hostage, by whatever means, they would be treated as its legitimate government. No one would be allowed to invade them. UN peacekeepers might even help to quell internal uprisings. In the same way that members of the Mafia would use their ill-gotten wealth to "go legit" as honest businessmen, any gang leader who managed to fix an election or cow the populace of a small country could be treated as the equal of the President of the United States. The United Nations itself has given hope to the ambitions of the world's most ruthless dictators.

How ridiculous is it for Libya, while itself under stricture for human rights abuses, to head the UN Human Rights Committee? Did it make any sense for -- of all places in the world -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq to chair the UN Disarmament Conference in 2003? Yet this is precisely how matters stood a year ago. Apologists for the UN say that everything is equal, that all committee chairs move among the members in alphabetical rotation, and that their "fitness" to head various offices is never questioned. That's precisely my point! Perhaps a nation's worthiness to head UN committees or conferences should be questioned before they are handed such responsibilities.

Liberals, in general, love the United Nations for three reasons. First, they consider it a "world government", although I certainly never got the chance to vote for my representative. (As a citizen of a Republic, however, I still have more of a say than would residents of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or any of the dozens of dictatorships that populate the UN.) Second, the UN gives France unearned power that they would never have on the world stage of their own merit, in the form of a permanent seat on the Security Council and a veto. Third, if the UN was a world government, the power of the United States to act in its own defense would be curtailed, which all Liberals seem to agree would be a good thing. The fact that a defenseless USA would not be loved by the world any more than a strong USA is doesn't register, it seems.

The United Nations has failed in its responsibilities time and time again. Thousands of UN peacekeepers stood and watched as 800,000 Rwandans were butchered right before their eyes in 1994. More than five years after the UN took over the administration of Kosovo, ethnic violence is still going on! According to Human Rights Watch:

U.N. police indicate that most of the violence is being directed at the ethnic Serb minority. Unidentified attackers have burned churches, homes, public offices and at least one school. Particularly disturbing are reports of arson attacks on newly built homes of Serbs who had recently returned to Kosovo following their forced displacement in previous years. 
The attacks bear similarity to the campaign of arson, abduction, intimidation and killing directed at Serbs and Roma in the summer of 1999. This campaign of violence forced 200,000 Serbs and thousands of Roma from the province. Human Rights Watch documented the violence in an August 1999 report, “Abuses against Serbs and Roma in the New Kosovo.” 

Worst of all has been the utter failure of the United Nations in Iraq. The oil-for-food program, instituted in 1996, functioned as a piggy bank for Saddam Hussein to the tune of over ten billion dollars. The UN itself, meantime, was raking in a percentage of every transaction under the program, socking away over a billion dollars in hidden UN bank accounts. What kind of interest does a billion dollars generate, and who is receiving it? UN Treasurer Suzanne Bishopric won't say. Despite the sanctions strictly regulating what kind of equipment was sold to Iraq, UN member nations Russia and China sold military equipment to Saddam, and France shipped Saddam spare parts for Mirage F-1 jets and Gazelle attack helicopters to Iraq, despite the sanctions and the impending war. High-ranking politicians and advisors in those three countries and many more were revealed as the recipients of oil vouchers from their friend Saddam. (Among those names was Benton Savan, the man who was in charge of the oil-for-food program.) France, Russia and China have led the corruption of the United Nations, which can no longer be considered a neutral body (if indeed it ever could have been). It remains to be seen whether the damage can be repaired.

One of the things that needs to be done to "fix" the United Nations is change a few simple words in its charter. Member nations -- which means, of course, all nations and/or groups of thugs who control a country by force -- have the right to act in their own defense. Article 51 of the UN Charter states, "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." Keep in mind that when this charter was written, "armed attack" was a perfect description of warfare. Armies sweeping across the landscape, tank columns rolling through the countryside, waves of bombers smashing cities to rubble -- that's what an armed attack was understood to mean in 1948. However, is funneling funds to suicide bombers an "armed attack" on the country in which they explode themselves? No... but it's an act of aggression, surely. Is a nation handing vials of anthrax to a terrorist group technically an "armed attack" against the country that subsequently suffers an anthrax outbreak? Same answer. How about a nation training small groups of religious fanatics in hijacking techniques, using only small knives? Same answer again. Iraq certainly engaged in two of these activities, and would almost certainly have engaged in the third had Saddam not been removed from power. Yet the Liberals --  a year after the war that ended Saddam's misrule -- still wail that Saddam had not "attacked" us, and so the United States was not "permitted" to defend itself under the UN Charter.

If we only added a few words after "armed attack" to reflect the realities of the world in the 21st century, it would go a long way towards making the UN more relevant to the necessities of the modern age. Inserting the words, "or support of terrorist groups" into Article 51 would allow UN members states to defend themselves against modern methods of attack.  Even if one is willing to ignore evidence of links to the terrorist group that bombed the World Trade Center 1993 and flew two passenger jets into it (and one into the Pentagon) in 2001 among others, Saddam's shooting at US and British aircraft over Iraq's no-fly zones and attempt to assassinate a former US President were "acts of aggression" against the United States even by the narrowest definition. (Many Liberals complain that the attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush was too long ago to care about, the same as Saddam's mass murders at Halabja, but I've never seen any mention of a statute of limitations on either crime.)

Don't expect to see the al-Qaedan Navy sweep up the James River and capture Richmond. This is a new war, in a new century, and must be fought in new ways. If our old friends won't help us, and our old institutions no longer serve our needs, we must either be prepared to find new ones, or be prepared to lose the war.