The indispensable Mark Steyn thinks the UN is impossible to reform and impossible to get rid of. Thus, the title of his article in the current issue of the [U.K.] Spectator: "There is no cure for the UN". I wrote on the UN last week and suggested that, because of endemic corruption and rampant abuse of those it purports to protect, the world would be better off if it were closed and everyone sent home. Mr Steyn agrees with my diagnosis:

What’s important to understand is that Mr Annan’s ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a human rights commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world’s torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed budget oversight committee will henceforth be policed by a budget oversight committee oversight committee. The oil-for-food fiasco is the UN, the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities.

. . . but not my action plan:

Those of us who believe that big government is by definition remote government and that therefore the pretensions to world government of the UN make it potentially the worst of all should, in theory, argue for withdrawal from the organisation. A neighbour of mine periodically pins one of his ‘US OUT OF UN NOW!’ bumper stickers to the back of my rig, and I’m happy to drive around with it. Outside a few college towns and effete coastal enclaves, I don’t believe there would be any political downside for candidates campaigning on a platform of pulling out of the UN entirely, and I’d encourage Republicans to do so if only as a way of unnerving those lazy pols like John Kerry who are prone to mindless transnationalist boosterism. But as a matter of practical politics I can’t see the US leaving the UN any time soon.

Mark, be more optimistic. Hope for a better and more just world! Reject the counsel of despair that the UN can't be made to go away.

On the other hand, the realist in me says that I'm afraid Mr Steyn is probably right. But I still think it's a shame.