I found the following in a comment on slashdot... it was very well written and I thought it deserved a post here since it summarizing the underlying failures of the post Cold War UN:

"'The UN was created to unite countries'???

It was created to do no such thing. It was created in order to prevent a third world war from occurring, with the Western democracies (the '1st world') on one side and the Soviet Union and its client states (the '2nd world') on the other.

This was a laudable goal, and to the extent that this did not happen, the UN achieved its goal. Like any other bureaucratic organization rendered obsolete by the passage of time, the UN has endeavoured to reinvent itself. Unfortunately, as the simple facts of the matter are that there exist more backwards, primitive, kleptocratic, oppressive governments than there exist enlightened democracies, the voice the UN speaks with is chiefly the voice of its basest and more numerous members.

Fer Chrissakes, Sudan, a government currently undergoing an organized campaign of genocide against its own citizenry ,sits at the head of the UN Human Rights Commission. And what does the General Assembly do about such a travesty? It steadfastly refuses to pass a resolution condemning antisemitism.

That's pretty much the current UN in a nutshell. When it *does* manage to accomplish something, like imposing sanctions on Saddam Hussein, it ends up looting the Food for Oil program which was intended to spare the Iraqi people the worst impact of those sanctions.

It's a nest of vipers. It's not even that it's anti-American; I'm not arrogant enough to condemn such sentiment a priorily. But it's clearly anti-liberal, and I use that word in its classic Lockeian sense. The ideals that this country was founded on, that individual liberty is the highest goal for which one can struggle, are anathema to the Westphalian notions of national sovereignity that the UN was founded upon. If we do truly hold that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then how can we go about treating illegitimate governments to an equal seat at the table?

Nations like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, Singapore, and Iran make up a large part of the UN. There is no way in hell I want those countries having the merest degree of jurisdiction over what I can do, say, or read on the internet. The very suggestion is utter lunacy."

BTT because its worth reading and appears to have been overlooked