A good article on the United Nations system

Read "Is the UN Doomed?" by Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books (Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007). Subscription or online payment is required to read this.

This is a spirited defense of the United Nations, especially refuting the attack made by one of the three books reviewed by the author.

I was impressed by Judt's very negative comments on the role of the United States in the recent (largely unsuccessful) effort to reform the United Nations.

(U,S. Ambassador John) Bolton didn't merely oppose effective reform at the UN but seized every opportunity to sneer at the institution itself, describing it variously as "incapable" and "irrelevant".....When proposals for a reformed Human Rights Council finally reached the floor of the General Assembly, 188 countries voted to implement them. Four votes were cast against, Israel, the Marshall Islands, the US -- and Belarus.

In a footnote, Judt notes:

Back in 2001, as US under-secretary of state for arms control and international security [sic], Bolton successfully derailed a UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, and was even accompanied to the meeting by members of the National Rifle Association.

Comment: Too bad we don't have better international agreements to help limit the illicit trade, now that we are involved in the "war on terrorism", not to mention fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would also note that there are too many places, like Darfur, where thugs with small arms and light weapons are terrorizing defenseless populations. JAD